Death Takes a Holiday (musical)

Death Takes a Holiday
Music	Maury Yeston
Lyrics	Maury Yeston
Book	Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan
Basis	La Morte in Vacanza by Alberto Casella
Premiere	July 14, 2011: Laura Pels Theatre, New York City
Productions	2011 Off-Broadway 2017 Off West End

Death Takes a Holiday is a musical with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan. The story is adapted from the 1924 Italian play La Morte in Vacanza by Alberto Casella, which was adapted in English for Broadway in 1929 by Walter Ferris. That play was made into a 1934 film of the same name starring Fredric March, which was remade in 1998 as Meet Joe Black, starring Brad Pitt. The story of the musical is about lonely Death, who takes the form of a handsome young prince to understand human emotion. He falls in love with an engaged young woman and learns about love and sacrifice.

The show played Off-Broadway for a limited run in the summer of 2011 in a production by Roundabout Theatre Company. The production garnered mixed reviews. It received eleven nominations for 2011–12 Drama Desk Awards, but did not win any. An Off West End production opened in 2017.

Maury Yeston and Peter Stone began work on the musical in 1997, immediately after their success with Titanic.Titanic was a large-scale show, and Yeston and Stone decided to turn to a smaller-scale work for their next piece. They felt that the Cassella play, a story celebrating the joy and humor of love, was both universal and moving, and that with its recent adaptation as Meet Joe Black, it was a good time to musicalize the story. Yeston said, "it seemed to me that the piece screamed to be sung." Since the story is set in Northern Italy during the Roaring Twenties, Yeston incorporated jazz, the Shimmy, and other period styles into his contemporary score "to achieve a modern sensibility within the Period flavor of the score." Yeston had lived in Northern Italy for a time, which informed his writing.

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