NEW YORK — Float like a butterfly, sing like a bird.
A Broadway musical exploring the life of the late heavyweight boxing titan Muhammad Ali is in development, producers said Wednesday.
The musical, “Ali,” will be written and directed by Clint Dyer and produced in partnership with Ali’s widow, Lonnie, according to a news release. Dyer shepherded a musical about Bob Marley onto London’s West End.
Ali, hugely charismatic with fleet feet and a powerful punch, was a three-time world heavyweight boxing champion from Kentucky who defied racism, becoming one of the world’s most recognizable athletes and a brave if polarizing antiwar figure.
He died at 74 in 2016.
“Muhammad has been a muse and continues to be a source of inspiration to so many artists around the world,” Lonnie Ali said in a statement. “I’m so proud to support this project and am thrilled to see his story brought to life on the Broadway stage.”
A detail-light website for the production was posted online Wednesday morning. The news release said the musical will have a U.S. engagement before it arrives on Broadway, but did not provide a timeline.
Teddy Abrams, the music director of the Louisville Orchestra, is set to conjure the music for the production. He said in a statement that Muhammad Ali deserves the “epic, dramatic treatment of a full-scale musical.”
Ali himself starred in a mostly forgotten Broadway musical, “Buck White,” which opened at the since-demolished George Abbott Theatre on Dec. 2, 1969, and closed four days later.
Playing a Black power leader, Ali did not appear onstage until halfway through the short-lived show, but proved a surprisingly strong singer, according to a review by John Chapman, the Daily News’ theater critic at the time.
“The chief attraction of this new work is the appearence of Muhammad Ali,” Chapman wrote, adding that the boxer-turned-actor took “charge in amazing fashion.”
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