From: The Hollywood Report; 5/21/10
Cage Drops Lieutenant
Nicholas Cage (The Rock) has announced he is to step down from the starring role in the forthcoming multi-million dollar Broadway adaptation of his own hit movie Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call New Orleans.
Bad Lieutenant! which was due to open next month, will be directed by Greg Zhalick (Mapplethorpe!); chosen because of his unconventional stagings of Irreversible and The Borrowers and features a number of original songs by Marvin Hamlish (The Way We Were). Cage, who would have been singing on stage for the first time in his career, would have been belting five new numbers written expressly for him including; ‘Crack Rock’, ‘You’re a bad girl baby (but you’re good to me)’ and the titular ‘I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant’:
‘I like guns, I like drugs, I like prostitutes,
I’m on the street lookin’ for old ladies to shoot,
Yeah I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant
Chorus: All the way from New Orleans!
Yeah I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant’
©Zube Productions 2009
The production will be rescheduled with the lead being taken by relative newcomer Zed Rippton (The Rock!). It also features Biff Hipshorn (Mamma Mia 2: The Legacy) as his imaginary sidekick Iggy the Hallucinated Iguana and Duine Bensey (Alas Smith and Jones!) as Golden-hearted Nancy, his prostitute girlfriend. Some of the songs are already generating buzz on the ‘net especially the show stopping: ‘Don’t point that gun at me young man’ and the sultry ‘I’m not resisting, officer’.
The songs were written by Hamlish for the movie under its production title; ‘Werner Herzog’s Able Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call – New Orleans: The Musical’ but they were dropped for the sake of coherence. Cage’s reasons for dropping the role are unclear although it’s widely rumoured that he has accepted a lucrative contract to appear in a sequence of in-house infomercials for Satan himself.
Posted by thearcadian 
