David Williams’ career as a children’s book writer has been extremely successful. He outsold JK Rowling and Philip Pullman in 2017. Two UK songwriters – Cooper and Coler – are now adapting Billionaire Boy for the stage. The musical was written in the space of just a few months.
The plot of the story is that Joe Spud, a 12-year-old boy, has all the money he could possibly ever dream of, but no friends. Cooper and Coler, the songwriters who have adapted this tale, have been responsible in the past for hits by the Sugababes, Kylie Minogue, Alesha Dixon and Girls Aloud. This is a very different process to writing a pop song. Cooper has said that: “It’s far more rigorous lyrically, it obviously has to move the narrative of the show along, whereas a pop song can often by much more static. In a musical, you can’t just have the script going along telling a story and then you have a song – the story has to run through the song to the other side, and move the plot forward.”
Billionaire Boy opens at the Nuffield Southampton on 28th November.
Click on the link below to watch the trailer for the musical:
