Baz Sex bomb Tom helps put Tom Jones on stage
Star in talks for musical of classic novel
MIAOW! what’s New Pussycat? Singing legend Tom Jones is on the brink of joining the team of producers behind a new show featuring songs the hip-swivelling welshman made famous, that’s what.
The musical just happens to be called what’s New Pussycat?, the title of the Burt Bacharach number Jones had a hit with in 1965.
it’s based not on the singer’s own life story but on Henry Fielding’s 18th-century novel about a foundling, one Tom Jones, who leaves the west Country and ends up philandering and allowing himself to be seduced by an older woman as he makes his way through London society.
Chris Harper is putting the show together with fellow producer Flody Suarez and director Luke Sheppard.
Harper explained that american writer Joe DiPietro came up with the idea of setting Fielding’s Georgian novel Tom Jones in 1960s Swinging London, using numbers associated with the singer, such as it’s Not Unusual, Green, Green Grass of Home, Delilah and Sex Bomb.
Born Thomas woodward in Pontypridd, the singer renamed himself Tom Jones after the success of the oscar-winning 1963 screen adaptation of Fielding’s novel in which albert Finney played the good-hearted roue.
‘in this version, Tom Jones becomes a famous pop star and is seduced by an older woman — who in the Fielding tale would have been the Lady Bellaston character,’ said Harper.
But the hero is truly in love with a girl back in the west Country who has also made her way to London. Her name’s Mary and she designs clothes. (No, her surname isn’t Quant.) Director Sheppard said: ‘There’s perfect symmetry there.’
Last night, a spokesman for Jones confirmed that the singer is ‘currently negotiating to come aboard as a producer’.
arlene Phillips, the celebrated choreographer who created the moves for Jones on his Sixties TV show, has signed up to choreograph the production.
‘She’s the ultimate Sixties girl,’ Harper observed. She has been indefatigable guiding Sheppard through the Sixties scene. ‘She lived and breathed it and has encyclopaedic knowledge of the era,’ he told me.
THE director, who worked on the olivier awardnominated west end show & Juliet, added that although the hero of what’s New Pussycat? has his share of ladies, ‘a focus of our show is not about him in any way exploiting his sexuality; in some ways it’s how other characters look at him as an object of desire’.
The search for a young man in his early 20s who boasts ‘ extraordinary talent and confidence’ begins next week. Harper stressed that what’s New Pussycat? is not ‘ Tom Jones’s life. it’s the musical of the book’.
Describing Jones’s involvement in the project, producer Suarez told me: ‘He came to one of the workshops with his son and daughter-in-law, and he told us that what he’s happiest about is that it didn’t try to take his life story. it’s about the book and the songs.’
Rights to use 16 songs connected with Jones have been licensed for the show, which will begin performances at Leeds Playhouse from September 23. if it works, it will transfer to London next year. writer Pietro and Sheppard quietly did an early workshop of what’s New Pussycat? more than three years ago. They have continued working on it on and off ever since.
an a-list creative team with Jon Bausor, Gabriella Slade and Howard Harrison on sets, costumes and lighting respectively will bring a Sixties vibe to a comedic tale that, when it was first published in 1749, scandalised some readers.