Eric Woolfson - Musical Theatre

Musical Theatre

Woolfson was eager to write for musical theatre. He explained his career switch during an interview in 2004:

"I eventually developed The Alan Parsons Project as a vehicle but then I realised that there was more to it than that and that Andrew Lloyd Webber was right and that the stage musical was a fulfilling media for a writer like myself. I got into stage musicals in the mid-1980s." His musicals are mainly performed in Germany. This was for two reasons: The Alan Parsons Project was well known in Germany, and at that time the arts were very well funded there."

His first musical premiered in Vienna in 1990: Freudiana, about Sigmund Freud. The success of this first work led to Woolfson’s second musical Gaudi (concerning the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi) (1995), which ran for over five years in several German productions. Gambler, Woolfson’s third musical also premiered in Germany in 1996 and had a first run of over 500 performances. Gambler has had six productions in Korea, two of which also toured Japan in 2002 and 2005 (the first time a Korean language production had been staged in this way).

A fourth musical Edgar Allan POE, based on the life of the author, was given a world premiere concert production at Abbey Road studios, London in 2003. An album was released in 2003 as Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination (this contains some but not all of the songs from the stage version) and a musical album CD 'Edgar Allan Poe' (containing the complete musical score of 17 songs) and DVD of the POE Abbey Road concert were released in 2009. DVD.

Dancing with Shadows (inspired by the anti-war play Forest Fire by the Korean playwright Cham Bum-Suk and with a book by Ariel Dorfman) was premiered in July 2007 in Korea.