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Rocky Being Adapted as a Musical

From the Big Scrapple to the Big Apple? Rocky is being adapted into a stage musical. Tony-winning songwriting duo Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and writer Thomas Meehan are well along in their work on the 1976 Best Picture Oscar winner, according to The New York Times.

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Robyn Ross

From the Big Scrapple to the Big Apple?Rocky is being adapted into a stage musical.

Tony-winning songwriting duo Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and writer Thomas Meehan are well along in their work on the 1976 Best Picture Oscar winner, according to The New York Times.

"It's been a long gestation period, but it's come to be a work that we're really proud of. There was some worry early on — could we really make a musical out of a boxing picture? Could you make Rocky sing and dance? But when we did the reading, people were very impressed, and we're going forward," Meehan said.

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The project will be a relatively small production with about five principal characters and a plot similar to the first Rocky picture which tells the story of Philly fighter Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) who gets a shot at the heavyweight title.

"At first I thought, all the world needs is a Rocky musical," Meehan told the Times. "But then I looked at the film. I thought it had beautiful construction and such high emotion, and it was a natural musical: There is a David and Goliath story, a Cinderella story, a love story between two outcasts. It's less about boxing than about finding self-respect and finding your soul mate."

Stallone, who wrote the original film too, owns the rights to the story and is a producing partner.

It's the latest in what's now a long line of movies adapted into Broadway shows, including Sister Act and Catch Me If You Can.

The production team hopes to mount the musical in Germany by fall 2012 and then Broadway by spring 2013.

Would you watch a Rocky musical?