Spike Lee’s next project: A Viagra musical

Spike Lee has made films about a black detective’s search for infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan, a bomb attack on a church in Alabama, and the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

But for his most recent project, a film musical that highlights the invention of Viagra, the first by the F.D.A. To treat erectile dysfunction, he has taken a song-and-dance approach.

“I will stage a dance, singing everything,” he wrote in a statement in which he announced the project on Tuesday.

The film is based on a 2018 Esquire article that traces the discovery and commercialization of the drug, Deadline reported for the first time. Lee will write the script with British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. The songwriters Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, who created the Tony award-winning musical “Passing Strange”, will compose the music. (Lee shot this musical as a concert film during its Broadway run in 2008.)

“Overjoyed to dance with Brother Spike,” wrote Kwei-Armah on Twitter on Tuesday. Kwei-Armah is also Artistic Director of the Young Vic Theater in London.

An Oscar winner Lee is known for approaching serious topics with a concise eye. His recent projects include “Da 5 Bloods,” a war drama about a group of black veterans returning to Vietnam, and “BlackKkKlansman,” a dark comedy about the first African American detective in a police station to win an academy award for the am Lee best adapted script. Lee also adapted his 1986 breakthrough debut “She’s Gotta Have It” into a 2017 series that ran for two seasons on Netflix.

But musicals are not alien to him either: this fall he released his filmed production of David Byrne’s Broadway concert “American Utopia”; In 1988 he directed School Daze, a film full of musical numbers about political and social clashes between students at a historically black college.

In his statement announcing the project, Lee thanked his late mother for dragging him to the movies as a child in Brooklyn. “I didn’t want stupid people to sing and dance,” he wrote – it was basketball, soccer, crack top, down da sewer, and a host of other New York street games that had his heart.

He wrote that as the eldest of five children and with a father who “hated HollyWeird movies,” he was his mother’s movie date.

“Thank you Lawdy, she didn’t hear my persistent complaints about musicals,” he wrote.

No release date or casting for the project has been announced. A representative from Lee didn’t immediately answer when asked whether the project would be a sung-through musical or just songs interspersed with dialogue.

Viagra, commonly known as Sildenafil Citrate, was patented by drug maker Pfizer in the 1990s and was originally used to treat heart-related pain. However, because of the drug’s vasodilatory effects, it has also been helpful to have blood pumped to other areas of the body. It made its commercial debut in the United States in 1998 after the F.D.A. approved it for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.