The 1999 teen romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles, is set to be turned into a musical on Broadway by a creative team laden with Grammy and Tony awards.
The stage adaptation will be scored by “Call Me Maybe” singer Carly Rae Jepsen and Ethan Gruska, and will be based on a book by Girls star Lena Dunham and veteran playwright and librettist Jessica Huang. The direction and choreography will be done by Christopher Wheeldon, with musical arrangements and orchestrations to come from Tom Kitt.
The original Touchstone Pictures movie, loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew play, was a breakout film for Ledger and Stiles and had a cast that included Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Allison Janney and Larry Miller. Ledger played Patrick Verona, the bad-boy heartthrob who is paid to pursue the rebellious, hard-headed Kat Stratford (Stiles) as part of a plot set at a high school in the weeks before the prom in a Pacific Northwest town.
In one memorable scene, Stiles’ Kat recites an emotional poem to Ledger’s Patrick in which she expresses her heartbreak and feelings for him as she offers 10 things she “hates” about him. The original movie was penned by debut screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith and was directed by Gil Junger.
The stage adaptation, now in development, will produced by Mike Bosner and in partnership with Buena Vista Theatrical. The movie 10 Things I Hate About You was also adapted as an ABC Family series that starred Miller, Lindsey Shaw, Meaghan Martin, Ethan Peck, Nicholas Braun and Dana Davis.