JOSS AND DAVE’S PEN POWER
SINGER Joss Stone has teamed up with Dave Stewart to write the songs for a stage version of novelist Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling weepie The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Stone and Stewart have already composed several soulful numbers for the musical, adapted by Lauren Gunderson, which tells the story of Henry, a man with a genetic anomaly that causes him to flit back and forth in time, where he keeps bumping into the same girl: Clare.
A godawful film version, starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, focused on Henry’s story. However Stone told me, in an email sent from her home in New Jersey (where she’s nursing fiveweek-old daughter Violet), that ‘given that the title is The Time Traveller’s Wife, we wanted to tell the story from Clare’s point of view’.
‘Clare inspires me, because she is a strong character who has so much love in her heart that she is willing to give fully, if she feels respected and cared for,’ she continued. ‘Isn’t this how we all want to be?’ And she added that even though Clare has to endure a lot, she ‘never wallows in self-pity’.
Stone recently wowed TV audiences with her amazing voice when she won The Masked Singer (as Sausage).
I’ve listened to her singing some of the powerful and romantic numbers for the new project, and they’re very good. But she won’t be starring in the show, which producer Colin Ingram said will open next year at a non-profit theatre, with Bill Buckhurst directing, before transferring to the West End. Ingram said he intends to cast a black actress to play the central Clare (though she will be played by different actresses at other ages).
In the film version, Bana’s Henry kept turning up naked when he journeyed back in time to see Clare. ‘He’s not going to time travel without his clothes!’ Ingram assured me. ‘You’ve got a Clare aged nine, and you can’t do a scene with a little girl and a naked man.’
However, there will be a moment when Henry’s in the shower — when Clare’s all grown up.
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