Ghost The Musical Sells More Kleenex Than Any Other Musical

"Writing a musical about when a main character is dead from about ten minutes onwards, and there's a ghost, was challenging to say the least," Dave Stewart, one half of Eurythmics and co-writer of Ghost The Musical's original score, admits. The musical is adapted from the 1990 film starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore and Stewart chuckles, "We sell more Kleenex than any other musical, I think. I kept telling them, you know: 'There's no better name for a tissue than Ghost, right?'"  

"I kept telling them, you know: 'There's no better name for a tissue than Ghost, right?'" 

Glen Ballard, who co-wrote the music and lyrics, recalls it was "six or seven years ago" when he received a phone call from Stewart. "I was brought into the project by Dave and I quickly got to meet Bruce Joel Rubin, the Oscar-winning genius who created all these characters of the movie, and the three of us instantly hit it off." Rubin won Best Original Screenplay for the movie version of Ghost and Ballard adds, "We took a Hippocratic Oath, Dave and I: first do no harm to this piece, this great movie... I mean, I can't imagine lynch mobs coming after Dave and me, 'How dare you ruin my favourite movie!' you know?" Ballard also praises "this great genius" director Matthew Warchus (who also directed Matilda The Musical) "because he knew exactly what he wanted to do". "He really broke it down for us — how to simplify a very complicated script — and he basically added a dramaturgy to the piece so that we could understand how to put it on stage."

"It's hard to explain to people how much goes into it," Stewart opines of this screen-to-stage adaptation, "because you're working with very different sort of mediums all at once. So if the set designer can't get the set to move in time for the choreographer to get the character on stage... then the music needs to be extended." The fact that it all has to "make musical sense" further complicates matters, according to Stewart. "The director comes in and then chops a whole scene out that you've just written your favourite song to [laughs]. So it is a real process."

He hadn't initially made the association, but recently Stewart had an epiphany about his musical theatre genes. "My whole entry into the world of music was [through] my dad in the little back shed in the backyard, building, like, little speakers and getting an old record deck and wiring it together. And he went out and bought, you know, 25 vinyl records. And this was all hidden from us as kids — I was only about five — and then suddenly one morning it was blasting out; I'd never heard music loud or anything and here was, suddenly, Oh What A Beautiful Morning and Oklahoma! and South Pacific and The King & I and, like, Rodgers & Hammerstein [was] sort of rammed down my throat for about five years in a row... I didn't really think about that until years later and I realised, 'Wow, how come I know all these songs off by heart?'"

"He had an electric drill and somehow I got the cat's hair tangled up in it so the cat was spinning around the room."

Describing his childhood home as "like Coronation Street", Stewart remembers no one was allowed into his dad's "six foot by six foot" shed. "Well I actually was banned, because he had an electric drill and somehow I got the cat's hair tangled up in it so the cat was spinning around the room. And then another time I set a match to some wood shavings."

When asked about his musical theatre background, Ballard reveals, "I can tell you that I was the director of my high school musical in Natchez, Mississippi, and the musical was called Once Upon A Mattress." We discuss how advances in technology have changed the face of musicals and Ballard offers, "It's almost like going to the movies now except you have live people there doing it." And there's something irresistibly dangerous about live theatre. "It's electrifying," Ballard concurs. "It is something in the human DNA that needs all of us in a room together, you know, locked into this one thing that's happening. And when it's really good, and we're all paying attention to it and we all feel the same emotion — which you do in this show, I promise — it's a magic thing! It's something that you can't duplicate in a computer or, like, in a recording; you have to be in the room, you know?"

As well as runs on Broadway and London's West End, Stewart confirms that Ghost The Musical has also made audiences in Korea, China, Italy and Turkey cry thanks to its universal themes. "For some reason Ghost [the movie] was massive in India," Stewart marvels, "and then Bruce Rubin, the writer, was telling me it really resounded with them: the afterlife theme and that whole thing. So once the movie went into India it stayed on in the cinema for years and years and years and became, like, this legendary film... I went to India with Demi Moore, to shoot photos of her in Mumbai and then in Goa, and I was amazed at how massive she was there from the movie Ghost."