R&B star R Kelly has announced that he hopes to adapt his cult ‘hip-hopera’ Trapped in the Closet for the stage. Launching the newest instalment of the sung-through soap opera – an increasingly improbable tale triggered by an adulterous one-night stand – the singer-songwriter said that he had received an offer to take it to Broadway, and might even star in it himself.“To transform it into a Broadway version, that’s what I’m working on,” said the 45-year-old, real name Robert Sylvester Kelly. Although he gave little away, a spokesperson for the singer told the New York Times that a stage version is “a very real possibility we are exploring”.
Trapped in the Closet started life as part of Kelly’s album TP.3 Reloaded, but a filmed version of 12 episodes was released on DVD in 2005, with a further 10 episodes released two years later. The series follows Sylvester, played by Kelly, through a series of sexual misdemeanours that spin out of his control, after he’s forced to hide in the eponymous closet when a lover’s husband unexpectedly returns home.
At the launch on 19 November, Kelly announced that he has written a further 85 episodes, the next batch of which will premiere on the American television channel IFC. “The chapters that are coming – the show, we call it – is going to exceed every chapter that you have ever seen,” he said.
That is quite a claim: previous episodes have involved a pimp with a severe stutter, an asthmatic midget and an awful lot of hiding in cupboards. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger.
“I’m just having a lot of fun,” Kelly continued. “I don’t have a job, so I sit in the studio all day and think of stuff to do and this is just something stupid I’ve done that’s been successful for me.”
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