Rebecca

Michael’s fas­ci­na­tion with Daphne du Maurier’s novel, REBECCA, began when he was still an enthu­si­as­tic teenage-reader. Lit­tle did he know that a sec­ond read­ing in the 1990’s would reward him with the per­fect story mate­r­ial for a drama musi­cal. Fur­ther research revealed an ongo­ing, fierce com­pe­ti­tion among big-name musi­cal the­ater authors for the rights to this story.

Finally, a 1992 view­ing of the musi­cal ELISABETH con­vinced the son of Daphne du Mau­rier that his mother’s work would be in per­fectly good hands with Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay.

Over the course of the next 4 years, Michael crafted the per­fect libretto while Sylvester com­posed some of the best tunes of his cre­ative career. The addi­tion of Francesca Zam­bello (direc­tor) and Peter Davi­son (set design) com­pleted the foun­da­tion of a “dream pro­duc­tion team”. The musi­cal REBECCA pre­miered on Sep­tem­ber 28, 2006, at the Raimund The­ater in Vienna.

The phe­nom­e­nal suc­cess of REBECCA in many Euro­pean and Asian coun­tries shall find its peak at the Broad­way pre­miere, pro­jected for late 2011 or early 2012.

REBECCA The Musical

The story begins in a small Monte Carlo hotel. The year is 1926…

Girl-next-door mar­ries Eng­lish aris­to­crat, Maxim de Win­ter, and moves in with him at his leg­endary man­sion, Man­der­ley Estates. There, how­ever, the atmos­phere is rather frosty. Mrs. Dan­vers, longtime-housekeeper to Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, openly expresses her ani­mos­ity toward the new wife: No one shall ever replace the first Mrs. de Win­ter, who in the pre­vi­ous year had died in a mys­te­ri­ous boat­ing accident.

REBECCA

As new infor­ma­tion regard­ing Rebecca’s death emerges, Maxim de Win­ter him­self is added to the list of pos­si­ble mur­der sus­pects. His young wife will now have to over­come her inse­cu­ri­ties and fight for her husband’s free­dom. Despite her ini­tial suc­cess, the spirit of Rebecca seems to be still unbroken…