“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” coming to Broadway? With Johnny Mercer songs?

I have a hard time seeing how this will work, but Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is being turned into a musical planned for Broadway.

From Michael Riedel at the New York Post:

And now “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is coming to Broadway, where it will be produced by Anne Hamburger, founder of the acclaimed off-Broadway theater company En Garde Arts.

Hamburger has hired Southern playwright Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Last Night of Ballyhoo”) to turn Berendt’s book into a stage musical.

Uhry has just about completed a first draft.

The musical numbers — and this is an inspired touch — will be plucked from the songbook of Savannah native Johnny Mercer.

And this:

Uhry and Hamburger had a private tour of the [Mercer-Williams] house last week.

Their guide, Hamburger says, elaborated on “the incident” by adding: “It was an act of self-defense.”

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is “a great example of the underbelly of America,” says Hamburger. “There are the things that all of us do on the surface — and then there are the things we do underneath.”

Or, as Johnny Mercer once put it, “When we played our charade . . . ”

So purely lyrical in their evoking of emotions without clear narrative lines, Mercer’s songs could somehow be used for the tragedy at the core of Midnight, but we’ll have to see how this works our . . .

UPDATE: Btw, this news is a few months old, but I had missed it completely.