Steve Jobs – The Musical: An opera about the Apple founder’s life is coming in 2017
A Steve Jobs musical is coming in 2017, after the Santa Fe Opera commissioned a piece about the Apple founder’s life.
The opera, due to launch in Los Angeles, will focus on the man behind the Mac, exploring the late entrepreneur’s personal relationships, with his wife, but also the daughter he initially rejected.
Composer Mason Bates, who’s also a popular electronic music DJ, told the LA Times he was inspired by the creative tech community in the Bay Area:
I thought there could be a way to write something about a creative technologist who would be the focus of a story. And Steve Jobs touches on the creative, technological and human side of things.
The opera, given the working title “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” is far from the first adaptation of the entrepreneur’s life after his death in 2011. A film starring Ashton Kutcher was released in 2013, and a second biopic with Michael Fassbender as Jobs is slated to open this autumn.
It will, however, be the first attempt to set Jobs’ life to music.
Bates will be working alongside libretto writer Mark Campbell and director Charles MacKay to create the musical that the Santa Fe Opera summarises thus:
The opera starts at a moment in Jobs' life when he must face his own mortality and circles back to the events and people in his past that shaped and inspired him: his father Paul, Zen Buddhism, his relationship with a woman whose child he initially disowned, his quick rise and fall as mogul, and – most importantly – his wife Laurene, who showed him the power of love and connection