By Roxanne "Flashbulb" Starr
Callie Khouri won an Oscar for her very first screenplay. She scored a hit with her first TV series, too — Nashville ran six seasons. So when someone pitched her on turning Thelma & Louise into a stage musical, she admits her first reaction was disbelief.
"I have a world-class case of beginner's luck," Khouri, now 68, told the Guardian. "I hope that this is not the end of that streak. That I don't hit a wall here and slide down it like Wile E Coyote."
It's an odd choice for jazz hands, and she knew it. The 1991 film — starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, with a young Brad Pitt in a breakout role — follows two women on the run after a murder, threaded through with an abusive marriage and an attempted rape. Khouri had turned down previous offers to adapt it for the stage. "My agent said, 'There's a guy who wants to meet you to talk about doing Thelma as a stage musical,'" she recalled. "And I just thought, 'Well, that's nuts!'"
She came around eventually, and the project picked up real momentum once producer Sonia Friedman signed on. A decade in the making, the musical has now premiered at London's Young Vic, with Rachel Tucker and Amy Lennox in the lead roles Sarandon and Davis made iconic on screen.
The film endures, Khouri suggests, because its core hasn't dated: a story about female friendship and the world's dangers for women. As she put it to the Guardian, it's still "not good to walk through the world feeling like prey" — a line that doubles as the piece's title and, it seems, as Khouri's thesis for why the story needed telling again.
This account draws on a single Guardian interview; we have not independently confirmed additional details of the production.
If I can't source it, you won't read it here.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian (Culture).
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."