'King Kong' Will Rampage All Over Broadway Next Year

Dont...look...behind you

Hide the dang Empire State Building, no matter how difficult that's going to be. The large gorilla King Kong is coming to New York City again next year to scale the heights...of Broadway.

King Kong, the story of a giant gorilla who was kidnapped from his home and [SPOILER WARNING] later killed by authorities just because he wanted to bring the love of his life to the top of the Empire State Building, will move from the screen to the stage and from Australia to America in 2018. According to Variety, the stage adaptation of the show first ran in Australia in 2013, but was greeted with mixed reviews, despite the presence of a gigantic animatronic Kong puppet on the stage throughout the show.

The Times reports that the King Kong musical has been a dream dating back to 2010, with producers first shooting for a 2013 opening date. However, after the cool reception given to the Australian production, producers chose to rethink things a bit, and wound up settling on not giving King Kong himself any songs or dialogue so as to better simulate the behavior of gigantic gorillas.

On the human side of things, no one has been cast yet, but the new version of the show will be penned by British writer Jack Thorne, who also wrote the Broadway adaptation of Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and feature a score by the British composer Marius de Vrie. The spectacle should be arriving next year, giving New York City plenty of time to prepare defenses should the 20-foot-tall puppet break free of its chains and leave a trail of destruction through Times Square.