Creator plans stage show

American hospital sitcom Scrubs is set to be made into a Broadway musical.

Series creator Bill Lawrence said he was in negotiations about securing funding, adding that composers had already submitted songs based on an outline plot.

He suggested the production would use an a cappella band as a Greek chorus – as Sam Lloyd’s band The Blanks did in the TV series – and feature fantasy sequences.

He told Entertainment Weekly: ‘I would do it as the Legally Blonde or Wicked model. It’s all the same characters.

‘The outline is kind of a mishmash of the pilot episode mushed together with the episode where Mrs. Landingham from The West Wing dies.’ That is thought to be a reference to the episode My Old Lady in which Zach Braff’s lead character J.D. tries to convince his 74-year old patient, Mrs Tanner (played by West Wing’s Kathryn Joosten), to start dialysis in order to prolong her life.

‘We’re combining two of our best stories with what we’re allowed to cull and choose from our best comedic moments and fantasies from nine years of the show,’ Lawrence added.

He added that he was inspired to give Scrubs new life given its popularity in Britain.

‘When Zach went over there and did his play All New People, he’d come out at the end and there would be thousands of Scrubs fans,’ he said. ‘So then we really started taking seriously the idea of Scrubs as a musical.’

However, he did not expect to cast Braff in the stage version, adding: ‘The only people I could see reprising their roles are Ted’s a cappella band. The reason that we put them on Scrubs in the first place, besides the fact that they’re funny, is that they are all musical theatre guys.’

And he said the challenge was writing a show to appeal both to audiences who had never seen Scrubs and ‘a psychotic fan’.

Scrubs ran for 182 episodes, first on NBC from 2001 to 2008 – then for two seasons on ABC after the original broadcaster cancelled it.

Here are scenes from My Old Lady:

Published: 17 Feb 2014