BRADLEY BREDEWEG (Book) is known for creating the critically acclaimed Freeform family drama “The Fosters,” which garnered awards including Outstanding Drama Series at the GLAAD Awards, the Emmys’ Television Academy Honors Award for Excellence in Television, the Television Critics Award for Outstanding Drama Series, and the Teen Choice Awards Best Drama Series. Executive Produced by Bredeweg, Peter Paige and Jennifer Lopez, the series ran for five season and resulted in the highly acclaimed spin-off “Good Trouble,” now entering its fourth season on Hulu and Freeform. He currently has a blind script deal with Skydance Studios and has sold pilots to Showtime, Amazon, Netflix, The CW, ABC and USA. In partnership with Google, he wrote, produced and directed the new musical Headless, a re-imagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, which starred Hadestown's Reeve Carney. Bredeweg also wrote, produced, and directed the musical smash-hit Scissorhands, a re-working of the classic Tim Burton tale as a modern queer love story. Other theatrical credits in LA include SCISSORHANDS The Musical and The Last Breakfast Club. He also continues to be an active producer and investor in the Broadway and West End scenes. Shows include the critically acclaimed revival of Side Show, Green Day’s American Idiot, the smash hit Dear Evan Hansen, as well as the latest Broadway sensation, Moulin Rouge. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @BradleyBredeweg
... I grew up loving Pat and Neil's music so on my road trip, I decided to pop in their BEST OF album. As I'm listening, I started to realize that there are about twelve or thirteen songs -- if you line them up in a certain order -- that perfectly tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. While I'm driving, I'm making notes about which song goes to which story beat. That night, I sat in bed, obsessing over the idea, and I started a first draft of the book. But I wanted to completely take the story of what we thought we knew about Romeo & Juliet and turn it all upside down. Mostly because as a young gay kid growing up loving the classics, the classics always felt very distant because there weren't any stories -- love stories in particular -- that genuinely reflected my own feelings and experience. I secretly wished the classics would somehow transform and speak to a wider demographic of people and readers -- not just white, straight, cis readers.
Pat and Neil were rules breakers from the very beginning of their careers - they broke all of the traditional rules and carved their own path in the music business! So if I was going to dare take a classic, do it my way, incorporate more diverse stories, more diverse characters and break all of the rules of storytelling -- who better to partner with than Pat and Neil? After all, their music is iconic, anthemic, and mind-blowingly groundbreaking. At the time, they weren't my partners yet, but their music was the inspiration that gave me permission to just go for it! ...