James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World Scene Reporter
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Tanninger Entertainment, the Tulsa-based firm that has brought a number of Tony Award-winning shows to Broadway including “The Outsiders,” is developing a new musical built around the music of the iconic synth-pop band Erasure.
“Oh L’amour – The Erasure Musical” will incorporate as many as 30 of the songs created by the duo of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell in a story about self-discovery and survival in late 1980s San Francisco. This will be the first Broadway-bound musical for which Tanninger Entertainment will be the lead producers.
“It’s really the first project that we are developing from the ground up,” said Jay Krottinger, who with Ryan Tanner and Patricia Chernicky are the principals of Tanninger Entertainment. The company has helped produce the Tony Award-winning revivals of “Oklahoma!” and “Pippin,” as well as the forthcoming “The Queen of Versailles” starring Kristin Chenoweth, which is scheduled to open Oct. 8 on Broadway.
“Oh, L’amour,” which takes its title from Erasure’s first major hit, follows a character named Sam, a relatively innocent college student who leaves the safety of home to pursue his dreams amid the chaotic promise of 1987 San Francisco. In a city pulsing with desire, romance and heartbreak, Sam embarks on a journey of self-discovery, finding an ever-expanding circle who become his new family at a time when love itself was an act of defiance.
The book for the musical is by Paul J. Lavoie, who has been working on the project for a number of years. Nick Demos, former director of Oklahoma City’s Lyric Theatre who has worked with Tanninger Entertainment on several theater and film projects, passed along Lavoie’s script.
For Krottinger and Chernicky, both of whom are fans of Erasure’s music, the prospect of developing a musical built around the duo’s music was a no-brainer. Tanner, whose formative years were spent listening more to rap artists such as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, needed a bit more convincing.
“At first, I thought, who is this group?” Tanner said. “But once I heard some of the songs, I realized I had been hearing this music forever. When we talk to people about this project, a lot have the same initial reaction as I did — maybe they don’t recognize the band’s name, but they’ve definitely heard the music.”
Erasure formed in 1985, when multi-instrumentalist Vince Clarke, who had been one of the founding members of Depeche Mode and Yazoo, placed an advertisement in a British music magazine for a singer. Andy Bell, who at the time was a shoe salesman, answered the ad and impressed Clarke enough with his audition to win the job.
Since then, the duo has released 19 studio albums, six live albums and 62 singles, including such hits as “Oh L’amour,” “Chains of Love,” “A Little Respect,” “Ship of Fools,” “Blue Savannah,” “Always” and “Run to the Sun.”
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Krottinger described Lavoie as “a true fan of Erasure — I’d go so far as to call him an ‘Erasure-head.’ He’s had the opportunity to meet Vince and Andy a number of times, and told them about this project, and they were 100% behind the idea.”
While the script has been a labor of love on Lavoie’s part, he had not secured the rights to use Erasure’s music. Because of the group’s international career, their catalogue is overseen by branches of Sony Music Publishing in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Sony Music Publishing is a partner in the musical.
“We didn’t realize all the challenges that would be involved,” Krottinger said. “There also are music publishing organizations in both countries, such as BMI in the U.S. and PRS in the U.K., and things that are binding in one country might not be binding in the other, and all that has to be negotiated. It took years to get things ironed out, but our goal was making sure the artists were properly compensated for the licensing of their music.”
Lavoie’s script also came under additional scrutiny.
“I’m always kind of the opposing vote on everything because I’m the only female in this group,” Chernicky said. “But the script started out very much as a story about a gay man in the 1980s, and though there are a lot of good things in there, I had a whole laundry list of things that I didn’t understand or that it didn’t mean anything to me.
“I also found some of the characters very one-dimensional, and that’s why we’ve had 16 rewrites so far,” she said. “I think they’ve done a really good job of broadening the story so that it will appeal to as many people as possible, but that’s always our goal, that the stories we want to share reach the broadest possible audience.”
A developmental workshop is slated for December 2025 in partnership with the University of Oklahoma’s Weitzenhoffer School of Musical Theatre. The development creative team includes Brooklyn-based director and writer Hunter Bird (“Masquerade,” “Bronco Billy: The Musical”) and Dominic Fallacaro, a Grammy Award-winning music director and orchestrator, as music supervisor.
“We knew that the very first thing we needed to do was to set up an academic workshop,” Krottinger said. “We couldn’t have made a better choice than OU, because they have been great to work with, and since most of the characters in the musical are in their 20s, we’re going in a good spot with an age-appropriate cast to really get to work on getting this show on its way.”
In a statement, Erasure songwriter and lead singer Bell said: “I have been staggered by Paul Lavoie’s tenacity, force of will and dogged determination, which is exactly what a production of this caliber requires, and I am thrilled that Tanninger Entertainment has had the foresight and courage to invest in his vision.
“The way the story intertwines with such sensitivity and power is like experiencing a living tapestry of song, sound and vision, and I cannot wait to see it on stage,” Bell said in the statement.
Bell will begin his first-ever solo tour the U.S. beginning Oct. 3 to promote his newest album, “Ten Crowns.” The tour includes a stop at the Tower Theatre in Oklahoma City on Nov. 18. For tickets and more information: andybell.com/live.
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
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James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World Scene Reporter
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