The Broadway director John Rando, who staged this fall’s critically acclaimed revival of “On the Town” and won a Tony Award for “Urinetown,” has opted not to sign on as director of the new big-budget musical “King Kong,” he said in an interview on Friday.
He had been in advanced negotiations for the job and spent several days last month with the musical’s producer and artists in Australia, where the show – and its 20-foot-tall Kong puppet – was developed and had a world-premiere run in 2013 that altogether cost a reported $30 million, a far higher sum than most Broadway shows. The producer, Carmen Pavlovic of the company Global Creatures, is now overhauling “Kong” with an eye toward bringing it to Broadway at some point, and has already brought on board a new book writer, the Tony winner Marsha Norman (“The Bridges of Madison County,” “The Secret Garden”).
Mr. Rando said he was “very fond” of the “Kong” project and Ms. Pavlovic, among others, but concluded that the timing wouldn’t work. He is already committed to another musical with Broadway ambitions, “The Honeymooners,” which will probably have a development workshop in the first half of 2015 before a world-premiere run at Goodspeed Musicals in September.
“The ‘Kong’ team is extremely enthusiastic about the further development of the show, and it required a tremendous amount of directorial time, my time, and that just wouldn’t work given my other projects,” Mr. Rando said. “They wanted me to start on ‘Kong’ yesterday, basically, and I couldn’t do that. It breaks my heart.”
A spokesman for Ms. Pavlovic, Adrian Bryan-Brown, said Friday that he expected to have an update on the “Kong” musical soon.