Glasgow Willy Wonka experience to be turned into musical

The Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow became an international story, satirised on late night chat shows in the United States and described as the biggest event disaster since the Fyre Festival.

Now a creative team has been inspired by the event, and are set to turn the whole botched experience into a musical.

The BBC reports that producer Richard Kraft has assembled a team for the project, called “Willy Fest: A Musical Parody,” which he hopes to launch later this year. He told the BBC that the writing team was “assembled in less time than it takes for someone to sing the first verse of ‘Oompa Loompa Doompa-Dee-Do’.”

“I don’t want to fall into putting on the very thing we are satirising, so we are talking to investors now to make sure we have the proper budget to execute this well.”

Willy Fest’s creative team inclues Riki Lindhome, who said in a press release that she believes the musical “could be Waiting For Guffman but with scam artists.” Also on board are High School Musical: The Musical: The Series songwriters Tova Litvin and Doug Rockwell, Broadway songwriters Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner, and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical songwriter Daniel Mertzlufft.

It’s been less than a month since Glasgow’s Willy Wonka “immersive” experience went viral for being so underwhelming that children were left in tears and some parents called the police. The fiasco involving rationed jelly beans and AI-generated scripts for actors will be the inspiration for the new show, says Richard Kraft: “If Ed Wood and P.T. Barnum got into ‘environmental experiences’ fuelled by a million dreams and zero dollars, it might turn out like this,”

“While most see nothing but wreckage in a disaster of this magnitude, we all think it screams out: Musical!!”