Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears Honored to Write 'Tales of the City' Musical

Singer teams with 'Avenue Q' creators to adapt Armistead Maupin's series of gay-themed novels!

On the bustling streets of 1970s San Francisco, neon lights pierce through the fog-drenched skies, disco music explodes from crowded nightclubs, and a wide-eyed Midwestern girl finds a new home—and creates a new kind of family—with the characters at 28 Barbary Lane. Three decades after Armistead Maupin mesmerized millions with his daily column in the city's newspapers, his iconic San Francisco saga comes home as a momentous new musical. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City unleashes an exuberant celebration of the irrepressible spirit that continues to define our City by the Bay.

It didn't take much to persuade Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears to get involved with a musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels. "I got an email from [librettist Jeff Whitty] wondering if I'd be interested in a musical that took place in the Seventies and had kinda fun themes that involved gays, copious drug use and trannies," he says. "I said, 'Of course – what is it?'"

When Shears discovered that Whitty had secured rights to produce a musical based on Maupin's series of books about gays, bohemians and other outsiders set in 1970s San Francisco, he jumped at the chance. "Jake grabbed me in the dressing room and said, 'Grab a keyboard, we're writing a musical,'" says John Garden, Shears' Scissor Sisters and Tales of the City writing partner. "That's when I was on board, it was that moment. We wrote a song that day that is still in the show."

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, a production featuring all-new music written by Shears and Garden, is set to run at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco between May 18th and July 10th. The show, which is penned by Jeff Whitty and directed by Jason Moore, both of the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Avenue Q, condenses plots from several of Maupin's novels into a single story. "It's a really ambitious show," says Shears. "There are 50 characters and 60 themes; it's a massive undertaking. The show is just like the books – there are very short scenes that go really fast. It's a very different kind of musical."

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