Bob Geldof Developing Live Aid Stage Musical For London’s West End

etcanada.com:

Sir Bob Geldof is returning to his best-known project to develop a stage musical based on his 1985 Live Aid concert. Featuring some of the era’s biggest names in music — ranging from Mick Jagger to David Bowie to to Tina Turner to Bob Dylan to still-legendary performance by Freddie Mercury and Queen — Live Aid raised millions of dollars to fight famine in Africa.

Now, Deadline is reporting that Geldof has teamed with Luke Sheppard (“& Juliet”) for “Just For One Day”, a new musical based on that iconic concert, set to premiere at London’s Old Vic Theatre in early 2024. READ MORE: Queen Recreate 1985 Live Aid Performance For Fire Fight Australia The musical will dramatize the events behind the scenes of the  show — which was actually two concerts, one in London’s Wembley Arena and another in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia — and will feature many of the musical numbers famously performed at Live Aid. “It’s not people dressing up as the artists and doing it as a tribute — we’ve moved very far away from that.

It’s all the extraordinary music from that day, but it’s sung by this fierce generation of musical theatre artists, who just blow the roof off,” Sheppard told Deadline.

According to Sheppard, the concept for musical is “Live Aid for the people essentially, as opposed to a kind of tribute act version of the show.” READ MORE: ‘The Simpsons’ To Recreate Queen’s Iconic Live Aid Performance In fact, the show will examine the event “from all angles, including from the technicians who are trying to pull off this satellite broadcast to the first-aid worker who was running the first-aid tent.” Geldof will be a character in the show, noting that “we also look at it through the eyes of a guy called Bob who happened to be at