‘Thelma & Louise’ Musical World Premiere Set For London’s Young Vic

A musical stage version of Thelma & Louise, the 1991 feminist outlaw classic written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, will receive its world premiere at London’s Young Vic Theatre in the fall.

The original movie starred Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as two friends who take off in a green Ford Thunderbird. What starts out as a weekend fishing trip turns into a gun-toting female buddy movie after one of the women is sexually assaulted.

Over the years it has been hailed as a seminal piece of cinematic art about female liberation. 

Khouri, who won an Oscar for her original screenplay, will write the show’s book with music and lyrics by Neko Case, the Grammy-nominated vocalist, lyricist and composer who has performed and published many songs about “women’s rage.”

Broadway’s Trip Cullman will direct the co-production led by the Young Vic, Sonia Friedman Productions, Blue Spruce Productions, Ley Line Entertainment, Khouri and Mandy Greenfield in association with MGM On Stage.

“It’s the most famous road-movie and female friendship movie of all time,” Nadia Fall, the Young Vic’s artistic director and CEO, told Deadline an in exclusive interview.

“There’s something scared about it,” Fall declared.

In fact, Fall’s film feature debut, last year’s striking road-trip drama Brides, was inspired enormously by Thelma & Louise. 

“How do you turn it into a musical? I think it’s really great that Callie is writing the book. That movie’s 35 years old but it still feels radical, this feminist story. And when you think of America and when you think of women’s rights and how they’re going backwards, I just think, ‘God, how is this story so damn relevant and still so brave?’.”

 Fall added that there’s a whole generation “who wouldn’t have seen it.”

She let out a sad sigh as we discussed how its reemergence is so timely. Women still suffer excruciating police and legal challenges when they go to the authorities to report a rape. They’re the victims, “but you wouldn’t know it from the way they’re treated,” she lamented. 

“Sadly, it should be an old story of yesteryear that things have changed, but they haven’t,” she said.

Last summer, producer Friedman assembled the team of creatives, cast and musicians to stage a series of workshops on the Young Vic’s main stage.

Amy Lennox (Cabaret, Kinky Boots, Lazarus, Opening Night) and Rachel Tucker (Wicked, Come From Away, Sunset Boulevard, The Great Gatsby), both celebrated musical theater artists, were knockout in workshops as the two desperados. They have been officially cast to play the leads in the show that runs from September 3 through October 24. “They are drop-dead gorgeous in it,” said Fall.

In a statement released via the Young Vic, Khouri said that the newly re-imagined story is “still a wild  and emotional ride, made even better by the enormous talents of Neko Case, Trip Cullman and our amazing creative team.”

When asked what’s in store for the musical after the Young Vic, Fall said they’re simply concentrating on getting the production into theater, reasoning that “it’s superstitious to talk about what comes next.” 

However, the show has been in development for several years, with involvement at one point from Amanda Seyfried and Evan Rachel Wood in a workshop in New York.

Getting to the Young Vic is the culmination of much sweat and tears, although hopefully no blood was involved.

The show’s future life will very much depend on what emerges from its eight week run on the south side of the River Thames across Waterloo Bridge.

The Young Vic’s new season also incudes Eurotrash, a darkly comic tale with cutting humor starring Kathryn Hunter (Poor Things, Andor, Black Doves) and Ben Whishaw (Peter Hujar’s Day, Black Doves, Paddington). The play is based on Christian Kracht’s 2024 bestseller. It has been adapted for the stage by Colin Jeevan, who co-wrote television movie The Tank  and the Das Boot series.

Walter Meierjohann will direct the production to run at the Young Vic from November 13 through January 9 2027. “It’s about our skeletons in a closet as people, but also as nations,” was how Fall described the play.

Other shows include the UK premiere of La Distance by Portuguese playwright and current director of the Festival d’Avignon, featuring original cast Alison Dechamps and Adama Diop. It will be performed in French with English surtitles  from January 22 through February 13 2027.

After which Debbie Tucker Green (Ear for Eye) will direct her new play Dissent, running from March 5 through April 24.

Fall will direct a new production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, the first of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle of 10 plays that explored the African American experience set in every decade of the 20th century. When Fall  ran the Stratford East Theatre in East London, she directed King Hedley II, the penultimate play in Wilson’s Pittsburgh canon that starred Lenny Henry and Aaron Pierre, who, by the way, is terrific, along with Olivia Williams, Giles Terea and Arthur Boan, in Clint Dyer’s brilliantly scorching production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that opened at the Old Vic on Wednesday night. It stands on its own as its own thing, just as the film version does.

The team behind Thelma & Louise includes choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, scenography by Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis, costume design by Ryan Dawson Laight, lighting design by Natasha Chivers, sound design by Gareth Owen, musical supervision by Kimberly Grigsby, orchestration and arrangements by John Clancy and musical direction by Ed Bussey, with additional music by Carl Newman, Paul Rigby and Zoe Sarnak. The creative producers are Mandy Greenfield and Sonia Friedman Productions, and the creative consultant is Imogen Brodie. Stuart Burt is the casting director, Peter Noden is the casting associate, Kev McCurdy is the fight director, Yarit Dor is the intimacy director, and Danièle Lydon is the  voice and dialect coach.