We’re just two months into 2025, and already two different stage musicals inspired by country music icons have made news.
Last week, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was announced, a production that’s based — like the Sissy Spacek-starring biopic before it — on the 1976 autobiography of Loretta Lynn.
And at a January press conference Dolly Parton laid out plans for a Broadway treatment of her life and songs, “Dolly: An Original Musical,” whose mononymic title nods to her nearly universal fame.
The producers of Parton’s project are currently in the casting phase, after a social media call for auditions last year (#SearchForDolly). And as with most of her myriad projects, the artist herself is heavily involved. She co-authored the musical’s libretto, and the production will premiere in Nashville at Belmont University’s Fisher Center this summer, four months after the orchestrated treatment of her repertoire, “Dolly Parton’s Threads: My Songs in Symphony,” has its own premiere with the Nashville Symphony.
Because Lynn passed in 2022, her daughter Patsy Lynn and former manager Nancy Russell will both serve as consulting producers on “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” But they’ll be able to draw on how Lynn refined the telling of her life story over years in the country spotlight.
Country music and Broadway musicals are certainly separate art forms, but they’re sometimes combined to great success. Think: “Oklahoma,” and “Annie Get Your Gun,” whose revival even starred Reba McEntire. And more recently, “Shucked.”
And one of the predecessors of Lynn and Parton, Patsy Cline, inspired a successful jukebox musical in the ‘80s, “Always … Patsy Cline.”
Their enduring songs and popular personas, along with the ways they kept their humble roots ever present as they became country royalty, make for show-stopping material.
