Film director Bill Condon brings 'Side Show' back to Broadway

[October 18, 2014]  By Elly Park

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hollywood film director Bill Condon is making his Broadway debut next month with a revival of the 1997 musical "Side Show" about British conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton, who toured the vaudeville circuit in the United States in the 1930s.

Condon, the director of "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn" films and "Dreamgirls" and an Oscar winner for his screenplay for "Gods and Monsters," has reworked the play that premiered in 1997 and is based on the book of the same name by Bill Russell.

Previews begin on Oct. 28 with the opening night on Nov. 17.

"We started having these discussions about 'Side Show' which had been so beloved when it was originally here but never really got the audience it deserved," Condon told Reuters after a press preview of the show on Friday.

"And I had some ideas about ways in which it might shift and we started a long conversation that included Bill Russell."

The original 1997 musical earned mixed reviews and ran for just three months but it developed cult status. Condon's revised version premiered last year at the LaJolla Playhouse in California and had a run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The revival will have significant changes. Several songs have been added, while other were cut and substantial rewrites were made.

But Condon said the biggest challenge for the new production was finding the right actresses to play the conjoined twins, who lead a cast of misfits and freaks in the show.

"Because you can imagine how hard it is to find two women who can sing, dance, act, be completely different kinds of people and look like they are twins," he explained.

"And we found these two really, really fantastic actresses."

Emily Padgett, who appeared in "Rock of Ages" and "Grease" and Erin Davie ("A Little Night Music" and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood") play the twins. The look-alikes wore a single corset in preparation for their roles.

"We were sewn in a corset together and we kind of stayed that way though rehearsal and we tried to stay that way during breaks," Padgett said.

"But we are very similar from hip to toe, so our strides are similar, so it's really not, it wasn't as hard as you might think," she added.

The actresses said they have developed a sisterly bond, loving and hating each other at the same time.

In a review of the Washington production in June, the New York Times described the show with the headline, "A Grandeur That Eclipses the Grotesque."

"The fellow with a third leg really appears to have that extra appendage, the lizard man sports scary scales, and the hermaphrodite seems to be split down the middle," it added.

(Reporting by Elly Park, writing by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Diane Craft)

[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.