This musical adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling 2003 novel got off to a bad start when it was first announced in March 2021 and it became apparent that nobody had actually told Niffenegger it was happening. Since then, things have settled down: the producers reached out to the author for her blessing, which they duly received (which to be fair they didn’t need to get it as she’d signed the stage rights away), and two and half years later we’ve got ourselves a musical.
With songs by Joss Stone and Eurythmics bloke Dave Stewart, and a book by prolific US playwright Lauren Gunderson, ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ is the biggest new British musical in years, certainly since ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ and ‘Cinderella’ in 2021 – and they were both announced pre-pandemic. It’s a sign that homegrown musicals might be inching back to their feet after a rough few years in which Broadway has bounced back much faster.
‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ has sold more than 2 million copies and been adapted into both a film and a TV show, so you probably know the general premise already. But if not, the story is a sort of philosophical romance about the complicated relationship between Henry, a man born with a rare genetic condition that makes him leap randomly through time during moments of stress, and Clare, his artist wife who is confined to linear time and experiences their relationship in a strange and confusing way.
David Hunter will play Henry and Joanna Woodward Clare, in a production directed by Bill Buckhurst and designed by Anna Fleischle.
