BWW Exclusive: Thomas Schumacher Reveals Next Steps for HERCULES, AIDA & More!

As BroadwayWorld previously reported, a new North American tour of Elton John and Tim Rice's Tony-winning Broadway smash Aida will premiere at Paper Mill Playhouse in 2021 before beginning a North American tour, directed by original company member Schele Williams. This will not be the same Aida of Broadway past, however.

"We're going back into it and exploring things that we would rethink today. [We want to] reinvestigate the material," Disney's Thomas Schumacher told BroadwayWorld. "All of these things that we thought we knew about Egypt and Nubia were actually wrong. What we thought we knew about the dynamic of these cultures has changed. So we're really reconstituting parts of the show."

Aida isn't the only new project on Disney's plate. While work on a musical version of The Princess Bride continues (a workshop will be held this spring), a stage version of Hercules, which premiered in summer 2019 at the Delacorte Theatre, is also an ongoing project.

"We're gonna take it to the next level," says Schumacher. "There is no intention of Broadway, but there are all of these theatres across the country that are dying for it. We've turned it into a two-act [show] and made some changes."

Schumacher also recently celebrated the release of the third edition of his book, How Does the Show Go On?. "There is an extraordinary collection of people that it takes to make a show and to make the community of a show- whether its onstage, front of house, back of house, and the people who don't even appear in the theatre, like press and marketing," he explains. "All of that was exciting to me and I wanted to make sure that the book represented all of it."

Click here to order the book today and check back this weekend BroadwayWorld's full, exclusive interview with Schumacher!