NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM Musical, With Music by Alan Menken, Has its First Workshop

The musical adaptation of Night at the Museum has had its first workshop!

As BroadwayWorld previously reported, the stage adaptation of the film series is in the works, with music from Alan Menken. Director and co-writer Shawn Levy has now revealed in an interview with Collider that the forthcoming production has had its first workshop.

"Well, I'm here to tell you that the pace of Broadway development is it makes movie development look lightning quick. It's super frustrating," he said. "But we have had our first workshop. We have the script, we have the songs."

Levy went on to say that COVID-19 had an impact on the show's production, as it did on the rest of the theatre industry.

"As you can imagine, Night at the Museum is not the kind of small show that you can try out in a small town in Connecticut. It's a big installation piece of musical theater," he said. "So it is not five to 10 years away, but it's not a year away either. I'd say it's somewhere in between."

"But we're feeling really bullish about it because our workshop was really successful, and I think the material is feeling really good to the powers that be. So it becomes a matter of waiting for theater availability."

Read the full interview on Collider.

Night at the Museum is a 2006 fantasy comedy film directed by Shawn Levy and written by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. It is based on the 1993 children's book of the same name by Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc. The film had a cast led by Ben Stiller, and featuring Carla Gugino, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs, and Robin Williams. It tells the story of a divorced father who applies for a job as a night watchman at New York City's American Museum of Natural History and subsequently discovers that the exhibits, animated by a magical Egyptian artifact, come to life at night.

20th Century Fox released the film on December 22, 2006. Two sequels were released: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian in 2009, and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb in 2014. An animated sequel, Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again, was released on December 9, 2022 for the streaming service Disney+.