Writing a Broadway musical comedy is nice work if you can get it. For New Jersey native Joe DiPietro, that’s not just a catchy phrase, but the name of his new show.
Nice Work If You Can Get It, which features music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin, comes to Broadway in previews this month with stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara. DiPietro wrote the script for the show, which he describes as “a 1920s farce featuring playboys, bootleggers, chorus girls, prohibitionists, moralizing politicians—and great, great Gershwin tunes.”
A two-time Tony Award winner for cowriting the 2009 Broadway musical Memphis, DiPietro grew up in Oradell, where he was exposed to theater at an early age. “My parents would always take us into New York City to see Broadway plays, and I had great English teachers at River Dell High School,” says the writer, 50.
DiPietro earned a National Scholastic Writing Award for his first one-act play, written as a junior in high school. His interest in theater grew while attending Rutgers, where he majored in English. Several off-Broadway successes preceded his Broadway breakthrough with Memphis.
Nice Work If You Can Get It, directed and choreographed by three-time Tony Award-winner Kathleen Marshall, opens April 24 at the Imperial.
DiPietro, who lives in Manhattan, is working on a new musical with his Memphis collaborator, fellow Jersey native David Bryan of Bon Jovi. Naturally, when DiPietro informs people he’s a Jersey boy, they pop the “what exit?” question. “Seriously, to this day,” says DiPietro, “that’s what folks still ask me.”