Busker Alley goes Broadway!

The 2008-09 season will finally bring Busker Alley to Broadway!

Busker Alley, the musical which has tried unsuccessfully to open for almost forty years, will get it's long overdue début next summer season. The announcement was made November 30th, 2007 by the producers on the Queen Mary 2. To compliment and harmonize this historic event, the new Busker Alley HD for Blu-ray disc will be officially released on this website Grand Opening night!

The original Busker Alley was a musical adaptation of St. Martin's Lane, a vintage 1938 London film depicting buskers and street performers entertaining the masses. Along the winding way, two buskers fall in and out of love on their way to glory.

Songs include "She's got a way" and "Busker Alley" written by Academy Award winners Richard and Robert Sherman of "Chim Chim Cher-ee" fame. With the Grand Opening, Busker Alley will take center stage and, once again, bid for the success it has always hoped to have on the Broadway stage.

Starring Tony Award winner Jim Dale as "stagedoor Charlie" Baxter, an aging St. Martin's Lane busker. He adopts a street urchin then watches his love go from street performing all the way to the St. Martin's Lane Theatre in London's performing arts district. Also starring Tony Award winner Glenn Close and a talented cast of professional dancers not to be missed.

Picture Gene Kelly swinging around the lampost in "Singing in the Rain". Now picture eleven lamposts with eleven colorful buskers singing and swinging around the set of Busker Alley! With a stage set to yesteryear thrown in for good measure, it promises to be a rollicking good time.

The return of Busker Alley's official Première marks one of the first times where all production numbers have been written decades earlier. The musical has suffered no less than five name changes.

The scene of the first scheduled opening was the St. James Theater. Artist Leroy Neiman was comissioned to paint a forty foot mural where he depicted a busker on stilts (left). Upon completion and told the original production's opening had just been cancelled, he remarked, "It just breaks my heart.".

You can see Tommy Tune and the cast of "Buskers" perform part of the title song on the 1995 Tony Awards here.

Real buskers had actually been booked to kick off the Broadway Première that never happened in 1995. These original buskers will once again reprise their performances...this time "live".

BuskerAlley.com is joining in celebration and awareness of buskers and performing artists around the globe. Stay tuned for the official HD disc release, press, pictures, and songs of the Sherman Brothers in the long-awaited début of Busker Alley on Broadway!