Lombardi’s Life Heads for Broadway

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Lombardi’s Life Heads for Broadway
By RICHARD SANDOMIR

The life of Vince Lombardi — one of the Seven Blocks of Granite at Fordham, the coaching saint, the mahatma of Green Bay — is the subject of a new play, and its producers plan to bring it to Broadway late next year.

There will be no singing or dancing, no crooning Lombardi, no “Damn Packers.”

“It’s 40 years since he last coached and that’s part of the reason we’re doing this,” said Eric Simonson, who is adapting the play from “When Pride Still Mattered,” David Maraniss’s 1999 biography of Lombardi. “His name is on the Super Bowl trophy. But who is the guy? There’s something about his character that reflects America.”

The producers’ plans to stage “Lombardi” will be announced Monday.

Lombardi revived the Packers’ franchise after his arrival in 1959, and led the team to five N.F.L. titles and victories in the first two Super Bowls. He made his players hate him and love him, favored the power sweep, became the tough-minded icon of coaching success and the embodiment of the quotable leader.

Simonson, a Packers fan who grew up near Milwaukee, said, “What really attracts me is there are parts that make up Lombardi that people really don’t know about, like how his Jesuit education informed his coaching.”

Sports-themed Broadway shows are not common. There have been successes like “Damn Yankees” and “The Great White Hope” and Tony Award winners like “Take Me Out” and “That Championship Season.” But there have been flops like “The First,” about Jackie Robinson, and “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

Robert LuPone, director of the New School for Drama, said it was nearly impossible to replicate athletic contests on stage, so sports plays and musicals needed to offer compelling human stories with universal themes.

“Lombardi’s a great choice,” he said. “He’s kind of mythical character you can glean lots of drama from.”

Elizabeth Bradley, who is chairwoman of the drama department at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, said that a nonsports fan needed to feel that the play’s quality transcended the subject enough to spend more than $100 for a ticket.

Tony Ponturo, one of the producers, said, “We have to be true to those who want good dramatic works like ‘God of Carnage’ and ‘August: Osage County’ while exciting the sport and N.F.L. fan.”

It would probably help ticket sales if a well-known actor were to portray Lombardi.

“It can be a star vehicle,” said Fran Kirmser, a producer who, like Ponturo, is also a producer of “Hair.” She added, “As the word gets out about this, we’ll take it as it comes.”

Ponturo brings a sports background to “Lombardi.” As the vice president for global media and sports marketing at Anheuser-Busch, he decided where the beermaker invested its huge advertising and sponsorship budget. He recently discussed what the league could do for “Lombardi” with N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Although Broadway is new turf to the N.F.L., marketing a figure like Lombardi is familiar territory. “He’s what the N.F.L. is all about,” said Tracy Perlman, the league’s vice president for entertainment, marketing and promotions.

The N.F.L. could boost ticket sales simply by giving the play a spot on NFL.com to promote itself. “Does it mean a licensing agreement, a partnership or a marketing agreement?” she said. “We’re in the early stages.”

The idea for “Lombardi” came to Ponturo and Kirmser in his Manhattan office in May when they discussed collaborating on a sports play. Kirmser said she saw his replica of the Lombardi Trophy that was awarded to the St. Louis Rams for winning the Super Bowl in 2000; he had it in his Anheuser-Busch office in St. Louis when he retired last year.

“It was just staring back at us,” she said.

He added, “We knew what we had to do.”

Kirmser and Ponturo called Maraniss, who said he would only work with Simonson, who had a substantial jump-start on dramatizing Lombardi: he had already written “Lombardi/The Only Thing,” a play produced in 2007 by the Madison Repertory Theatre.

Simonson said that the Broadway-bound play would be a closer adaptation of Maraniss’s biography than the earlier one, a metaphysical flight of fancy that was inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman.” It found Lombardi, at one point, working through a crisis through a hallucination.

Simonson said that when Ponturo and Kirmser asked him to write the new Lombardi play, he told them, “I could write five plays about him.” Simonson, a writer and director for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, said he was unfazed by the challenge of writing a sports-oriented drama for Broadway.

“I’ve been working in theater for 25 years, and I’ve been a Packer fan all my life,” he said. “I have a good idea of what a theater audience is looking for, and I know what’s going on in the mind of a typical Packer fan.”

He added, “In a big way, his idea of winning became such a part of the fabric of our culture of the ’60s.”