LISTEN: After having opened to rave reviews in Chicago last summer, the musical adaptation of John Berendt's 1994 bestseller is on its way to New York. GPB's Benjamin Payne reports.

Brianna Buckley (center) as voodoo priestess Minerva, who calls on spirits to help win Jim Williams an acquittal.

Brianna Buckley (center) as voodoo priestess Minerva in the musical “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in July.

Credit: Liz Lauren

The musical adaptation of the 1994 nonfiction bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will make its way to Broadway next year, the show's producers announced Monday.

The true-crime travelogue set in Savannah made its stage debut in Chicago in July for a one-month run, starring Tony Award-winning actor J. Harrison Ghee as The Lady Chablis and featuring original music and lyrics by Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown.

Producers haven't yet announced when in 2025 the show will open on Broadway, but Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil author John Berendt told GPB that he's excited to see it in New York, where he lives, after having enjoyed the Chicago production.

“I was absolutely surprised and delighted,” he said of the July premiere. “The direction is excellent, the dancing is terrific, the songs are very, very good and the scenery really takes you back to Savannah and Bonaventure Cemetery, where some of the action takes place.”

Berendt recalled that when he wrote the book — which loosely focuses on the murder trials of historic preservationist Jim Williams for his fatal 1981 shooting of his employee and lover Danny Hansford — he had no idea that it would eventually sit on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than 200 weeks, spawn a 1997 film directed by Clint Eastwood, supercharge the city's tourism economy and be adapted into a stage production 30 years after its publication.

“I thought people who read it would enjoy it; that's as far as I would allow myself to think,” he said. “People asked me, ‘Are you writing a bestseller right now?’ I doubted it because it's not mainstream. All sorts of crazy characters in it. I had no expectation that the sales would be as robust as they turned out to be.”

The musical's director, Rob Ashford, said in July that he hopes to someday bring the show to Savannah.

Tags: musical  theater  Broadway  Savannah  Georgia  Chicago