Should Bridgerton have checkmated The Queen’s Gambit for Netflix’s new hit musical?

by JORDAN HAYTER

The Queen’s Gambit is set to become the next hit musical.

The award-winning Netflix series left fans in awe in December 2020, telling the story of a young chess prodigy who achieves international success. Level Forward CEO Adrienne Becker and producer Julai Dunetz are set to produce the musical. Julai Dunetz said: “The story is a siren call amidst our contemporary struggles for gender and racial equality” and they are excited for “moving the project forward.”

Further details about the production are yet to be announced, but the production is hoping to open on Broadway.

However, some people are wondering why this Netflix adaptation was chosen when the idea for a Bridgerton musical had been taking the social media platform, Tik Tok, by storm.

22-year-old singer-songwriter Abigail Barlow and 19-year-old pianist and composer Emily Bear decided after binge-watching the series that it would work perfectly as a musical. Barlow said in Bridgerton: “there are just so many pieces of dialogue in this show that writes songs themselves. It’s just so poetic in the way it’s written.”

Barlow has posted many snippets of her musical score, including “If I Were a Man”, “Penelope Featherington” and “Burn For You”. Many of these songs took over the app and many of our heads, with people jumping onto the bandwagon, duetting and covering the songs, creating playbill artwork, set design, choreography and more.

A similar circumstance happened in 2020, during the initial lockdown, when Emily Jacobsen posted a silly, high-pitched song about Remy from the Disney classic Ratatouille. With everyone being locked in their house and wanting a distraction, this caused a major creative movement, with many different Tik Tok users collaborating together, making different songs, set designs, costumes, choreography, artwork, gaining recognition to the point that an online musical was put together with well-known celebrities such as Adam Lambert, Andrew Barth Feldman and Ashley Park. This virtual showing was created to raise money for Actors Fund and managed to bring in $2 million.