Dolly Parton announces Broadway show based on her life
Dolly Parton is turning her life story into a Broadway show and reveals that it is expected to premiere in around 18 months' time.
Dolly Parton is turning her life story into a Broadway show.
The 77-year-old country music legend has already enjoyed great success with the stage musical adaptation of her 1980 film '9 to 5' - for which she wrote the songs - but revealed that she is now intending to take her own story to The Great White Way before potentially turning it into a film.
She told The Hollywood Reporter: "I’ve been offered [a biopic]. I went back to Broadway with it. My life story’s going to come on Broadway and hopefully in the spring of ’25. And then if it don’t do great then, I’ll do it as a movie. If it does, then I’ll wait till Broadway goes for a couple of years and then I’ll do my life story as a movie."
The 'Jolene hitmaker - who grew up in poverty in rural Tennessee but became a star after working her way up through local radio and TV appearances - also revealed to the outlet that she is going to have her own TV show and that she and her team have been working on it for more than a year.
She said: "I’m going to have my own network show and I will have a lot of content about myself. We’ve been working on it for 15 months."
Meanwhile, Dolly achieved a hit with her self-penned ballad 'I Will Always Love You' in 1973 before it was propelled to mega success by Whitney Houston in the early 1990s but had denied Elvis Presley's request to record the track some years earlier.
When asked if she would ever consider using artificial intelligence to create a version of the song in the style of the late 'Hound Dog' rocker - who died in 1977 at the age of 42 - she immediately rebuked the idea as she admitted that she is "scared to death" of the technology.
She said: "I ain’t going to consider AI on nothing that’s human being. Because I think that is a weapon and a tool that can be scary. I think it’s going to be great for a lot of things, like science and medicine and many, many things, but not to replace human beings. That scares me to death. That’s like the mark of the beast. It’s like you can’t remake a person. I don’t want that. I want to just leave a body of work behind. I think all this stuff can be great, used in the right way. But not to replace voices and writings and not to replace a human being that belongs to God."
