MÖTLEY CRÜE‘s Nikki Sixx spoke to U.K.’s BUILD Series about the long-waited Broadway adaptation of his memoir, “The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star”.
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“The idea is to do with ‘The Heroin Diaries’ for the opiate epidemic what ‘Rent’ did for AIDS and HIV — to really shine a light on it and give back to communities locally, nationally and internationally,” Sixx told BUILD Series.
“I’m really happy that the word ‘epidemic’ is attached to this crisis right now, but I’m also very frustrated that it took us so long to get here,” he continued. “And so the timing for us is important, meaning it needs to happen now. And that’s what we’re working on. And we’re very close to having all the pieces together so that it can come out very early next year.”
CRÜE manager Allen Kovac told BUILD Series that the plan is for “The Heroin Diaries”musical to launch in the spring of 2020. “Our lead investor is the CEO of Live Nation [and] Ticketmaster,” Kovac said. “He put in the first million dollars, and we now have mayors across the United States. We’ve lowered the cost to go to a hundred cities instead of the traditional model of one Broadway or 20 major markets. We can now go where the crisis is. And we have bus companies, light companies, sound companies taking their profit off the table and doing it for cost. We have Faces & Voices [Of Recovery], an organization in 50 states, along with governors. And we wanna bring that to Europe and the rest of the world. And it’s about getting awareness and taking away the stigma, so people will talk about it.”
Sixx went on to say that he hopes “The Heroin Diaries” musical will further inspire people struggling with addiction to begin the road to recovery.
“It was the sixth day that the book came out, and I was somewhere in America at a book signing,” Nikki recalled. “And it was unbelievable — there wasn’t hundreds; there was thousands and thousands of people coming to these book signings. And there was a guy coming up in the line and he was shaking and he was sweating. And the security came up to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re a little scared, a little worried about that guy. Do you want us to remove him?’ And I said, ‘No. He’s kicking.’ And the guy goes, ‘What do you mean he’s kicking?’ I go, ‘He’s kicking dope right now, dude. You’ve gotta let him come up here.’
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And the guy came up and he started crying. And he had his one-day chip from being one day sober. The book had been out six days, and he was in the sixth day of his withdrawal. And that has never left my mind. I wanna see that over and over and over and over. It’s taken people out in droves — it’s unbelievable — and it doesn’t need to be. And we can get into political angles, we can get into all kinds of angles, but really, it’s all about the heart, and the story is real, and what can we do with that story.”