And so, when the 30th anniversary began to loom, Heifner became more open to the notion of turning “Vanities” into a musical. A friend put him together with composer Kirshenbaum, whose best-known credit is the off-Broadway musical “Summer of ’42.”
The musical version of “Vanities” was showcased at the 2006 National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival of New Musicals in New York and had its first production at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto that same year. …
Heifner’s long-standing reluctance to turn “Vanities” into a musical was based in part on the jobs he’d had rewriting other people’s musicals. “My experience of musicals has not been a lot of fun,” he admits. “I’ve tended to think that there are too many cooks on a musical. What I love about playwriting is that it’s usually just the playwright and the director, and you own it and you can pretty much control its destiny. That’s not true on a musical.”