As if you haven’t heard enough this past decade about Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, mother of the future king of England, her story may be coming to the Broadway stage. According to the New York Post, Tina Brown, author of the best-selling 2007 book, “The Diana Chronicles”, wants to turn the book into a musical or an opera. She would like to have Stephen Daldry direct according to theater sources. He is staging “Billy Elliot” next season on Broadway. The music? Elton John’s name is in the hat if for no other reason than he performed a tribute to Diana, the song “Candles in the Wind,” at her funeral.
The fact that powerful women would occupy all the principal roles makes her story as appealing to men as to women. “You will meet a formidable female cast,” say the publisher’s notes, “and understand as never before the society that shaped them: Diana’s sexually charged mother, her scheming grandmother, the stepmother she hated but finally came to terms with, and bad-girl Fergie, her sister-in-law, who concealed wounds of her own. Most formidable of them all was her mother-in-law, the Queen, whose admiration Diana sought till the day she died. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate ‘other woman’ into this combustible mix, and it’s no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.”
It seems to be a story that won’t die; the jury for the inquest into her death was still in session last week and recently ruled her death was partially caused by the paparazzi and the driver of the sedan she died in.
British-born author Brown is the former editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker magazines.
