Ready for a Harry Lime who sings and dances?
The Austrian production company Vereinigte Buehnen Wien has secured the rights to make the first musical version of the 1949 movie “The Third Man,” which starred Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.
The German-language musical is expected to premiere in 2016, according to the BBC.
The rights were held by Studio Canal and the Graham Greene Estate.
“We don’t have to make a copy of the film – we have to make a great work for a new audience,” VBW spokeswoman Katja Goebel told the BBC. “For sure, there will be many fans of ‘The Third Man’ who will come, but we will have to bring a new audience to the stage. That will be the great excitement, to make The Third Man live further, in another way.”
The creative team has not been announced.
In the Carol Reed directed film, pulp writer Holly Martins (Cotten) travels to shadowy, post-World War II war Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime (Welles).
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