Broadway producers are ditching the heavy, 10-pound production books they currently use for shows in favor of iPads. These books contain details — swapped out for each new production — about script and choreography changes in Broadway musicals.
Instead of these heavy books, producers on Pretty Woman: The Musical, Kinky Boots and other shows are increasingly relying on the considerably lighter iPad — complete with the app ProductionPro and an Apple Pencil for scribbling notes.
If you’ve long dreamed of seeing the epic tech rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates staged as a Broadway musical, written by two of the writers from Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken (and who hasn’t?), well, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a bit longer.
That’s because the somewhat unflatteringly-titled Nerds has seen its Broadway opening — originally scheduled for April — cancelled after one of the sources of funding pulled out of the project.
A new musical comedy coming to Broadway this April will spotlight none other than the two rivals for PC dominance, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Rather obviously titled Nerds, the new musical will feature some of the technology the two men helped foster, including onstage holograms, projection mapping and an app that lets audiences decide what ending they’d like to see.
Before Craig Federighi and Apple’s other software gurus unveil the future of iOS and OS X, let’s take a minute to appreciate Scott Forstall. If Scott hadn’t been kicked out of the company three years ago we would probably still be stuck with leather and felt interfaces.
Getting removed from Apple has paid off for Scott too. He’s helping Snapchat suck less, and last night, he won an award Tim Cook and Jony Ive will never be nominated for: The Tony award for Best Musical.
Forstall has been serving as a producer on the Broadway musical “Fun Home” the past year and last night the effort paid off big time, with ‘Fun Home’ sweeping up and taking home a whopping five awards, including best new musical, best book, best original score, best direction, and best leading actor.
Check out Scott with the rest of the team on scooping up an award:
Scott Forstall, the Apple executive who lead the creation of iOS and was then kicked out the company in 2012, says he’s not staying mad at Apple.
In a recent interview about the Broadway play he’s producing, Forstall addressed his split with Apple for the first time since leaving the company after the disastrous launch of Apple Maps. Rather than cheering for Google and Apple’s other competitors though, Forstall told the Wall Street Journal he’s ‘delighted’ that Apple is still making beloved products.
Josh Gad, star of the Broadway musical Book of Mormon, is reportedly in talks to play Steve Wozniak alongside Ashton Kutcher in Jobs, the independent Steve Jobs biopic coming later this year.
Apple employees at its Upper West Side store in New York City are being charged for racial discrimination after an incident during which they allegedly told two black men they were not welcome in the store and asked them to leave. Thankfully, the whole occurrence was recorded on a cell phone.
