Recruited by a very determined Sylvester Stallone, the original Rocky himself, Mr. Flaherty and his collaborators never tried to go the fashionable route of a winking sendup, like the musical “Xanadu.” But the chilly reception from Broadway backers knocked out “Rocky” until, the lyricist Lynn Ahrens said, “these crazy German people showed up.”

They were executives from Stage Entertainment, the leading European presenter of musical spectacles like “The Lion King” “Mamma Mia!” and “Tarzan.” And they came eager to grow their multimillion-dollar empire — which specializes in retrofitting Broadway musicals (even flops) for audiences in Hamburg, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere into their native languages — and to develop more shows on their own. If “Rocky the Musical” struck some as the dumbest movie-to-musical yet, following recent Broadway flops like “Ghost” and “Leap of Faith,” “Rocky das Musical” held promise as the sort of testosterone-fueled event that can whip German audiences into a lather….

Whether Broadway-caliber tastemakers will emerge along the red-light district of the Reeperbahn here, where “Rocky” is playing across from sex-and-kino parlors, is among the questions facing the show.

– Patrick Healy, N.Y. Times.

I could have excerpted basically any paragraph in the article. Click through and read it.

It sounds like the Rocky musical might actually be good, which is the most hilarious possible turn of events. I hope they bring it to Broadway and it kills, not just for the tourist crowd but for the snobby old Broadway lot that has been reeling since Sunday in the Park with George closed. And I’m obviously rooting for them to call it “Rocky das Musical” even when it’s produced in English, because it sounds both way sillier and way artsier that way.

Of the German production, Sylvester Stallone says: “All I understand is when Rocky says ‘Yo.'” In that way, his experience watching the German musical of Rocky is pretty similar to everyone else’s while watching Stallone in the original Rocky.

Via Meredith.