Musical Featuring Soundtrack by Destroyer's Dan Bejar to Premiere Next Week in Toronto

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Photo by Eirik Lande

Dan Bejar is readying his latest Destroyer release—a Spanish-language EP, Five Spanish Songs, out November 26 via Merge in the U.S. and December 2 via Dead Oceans in Europe. But before the EP comes out, another batch of Bejar's work is making its debut in Toronto. All Our Happy Days Are Stupid is a stage musical with a book by Sheila Heti and songs by Bejar.

According to Exclaim, the play is directed by Jordan Tannahill and will run from October 24 to November 3 at Videofag in Toronto. Every show is sold out.

In an interview with Bomb last year, Heti talked about working with Bejar and said some of the play's songs have already been utilized for a Destroyer album. "I sent him the play, and he wrote the songs," she said. "When it was clear the play was never going to happen, he put a bunch of them on his album."

The website Suburban Beast elaborates on the process of getting the musical staged:

After years of the script being passed over by established theatres, largely on account of it's unusual form and massive cast, Sheila and Jordan decided to gather together a group of their friends for a reading of it in a friend's backyard. As Sheila said in a November 2012 Globe and Mail article, at the backyard reading 'the things that just never worked, somehow they worked." It is in this spirit of gathering friends together to do the impossible that the piece will have it's birth at Videofag this fall.

Watch Destroyer play "Libby's First Sunrise" for Pitchfork.tv:

[url=http://pitchfork.com/news/52679-musical-featuring-soundtrack-by-destroyers-dan-bejar-to-be-staged-next-week-in-toronto/]View the full article[/url]