‘Gettin’ the Band Back Together’ to Open on Broadway Next Summer

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“Gettin’ the Band Back Together,” a new musical comedy about, well, a group of middle-aged friends getting their high school band back together, is to open on Broadway next summer, the producers said on Monday.

The announcement, a year before the opening, is early for Broadway but indicates the high demand for theater space and audience attention as the commercial theater sector booms. Even as the 2017-18 Broadway season is still taking shape, a number of producers are lining up spaces for the following season: “Gettin’ the Band Back Together” follows “King Kong” in claiming a theater and announcing an opening for the 2018-19 season.

“Gettin’ the Band Back Together” is about a 40-year-old, newly unemployed investment banker who tries to prevent the foreclosure of his mother’s house by reuniting his high school band. (Why? To win a competition with his high school foe, now the real estate owner seeking the foreclosure.)

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The musical, set in Sayreville, N.J., had a developmental production in 2013 at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J. Anita Gates, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a playful, good-natured, mildly irreverent and genuinely funny musical whose creators know how to mix the feel-good experience with touches of meanness.”

The show is a passion project of the Broadway producer Ken Davenport, who is credited as a writer of the book, along with the Grundleshotz (a group of performers and writers who helped develop the story through improvisation) and Sarah Saltzberg. The music and lyrics are by Mark Allen.

The Broadway production, to be directed by John Rando (a Tony winner for “Urinetown”), is scheduled to begin previews on July 19 and to open on Aug. 13, 2018, at the Belasco Theater (currently home to Michael Moore’s “The Terms of My Surrender,” which is to be followed by a production of Claire van Kampen’s “Farinelli and the King”).

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