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NIKKI SIXX BEGINS CASTING Broadway Adaptation Of The Heroin Diaries

MÖTLEY CRÜE and SIXX:A.M. bassist Nikki Sixx has just spent “a long and productive week” working on the Broadway adaptation of his memoir, “The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star”. He writes on Facebook: “[It’s] really exciting to finally be digging into the details and talking through set design and music for the theater stage (obviously, I have a lot of experience with set design which is helpful, but a theatrical presentation is different in a lot of ways). We have a great team and I am learning a lot. [I am] really grateful we have the people we have for this show.

“The music is now laced in with the dialogue,” he continued. “Most of the songs are written already, but I might need to write one more to fill a gap.”

Nikki, who is set to undergo a shoulder operation in the coming days, added: “Next up after I recover from surgery next week is casting.”

Sixx said last year that most of the music in “The Heroin Diaries” will be from SIXX:A.M. but that there will also be “a couple of MÖTLEY CRÜE songs in there, because it is my life.” He explained: “It’s based on ‘The Heroin Diaries’ book, and the music plays to that, because it was the soundtrack to the book, but it’s a little wider scope than that. It will probably tell some version of your story, or my story. There’s a lot of issues within it, that if you broke down psychologically what ‘The Heroin Diaries’ is about, there’s a lot of issues with abandonment, family issues and survival. So it’s a really interesting play, and it’s actually quite hopeful.”

“The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star”, which was supposedly taken from actual journals Sixx kept in the late ’80s while in the grip of a near-fatal heroin addiction, was originally released September 18, 2007 via MTV Pocketbooks/Simon & Schuster and debuted at No. 7 on the New York Times Book Review non-fiction best-seller list.

A tenth-anniversary edition of “The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star”, featuring several new chapters and a new foreword, is expected later this year.

The 400-plus page book, written in part with journalist Ian Gittins, was previously described as “a brutally honest look at Sixx‘s hellish year, one which saw him overdose and be declared clinically dead at one point while MÖTLEY CRÜE toured behind its ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ album.”

In a March 2010 interview with Brazil’s Dynamite magazine, Sixx‘s former MÖTLEY CRUE bandmate, singer John Corabi, questioned the authenticity of “The Heroin Diaries”, saying, “I love Nikki to death, and this is just my opinion… Everybody that I know that’s done heroin, they do heroin and they’re out. And I find it very hard to believe that somebody can do heroin and then have the foresight to write everything down. Everybody that read the book said it was great, though; it was a great book. It’s great reading, it’s a great book… More power to him, you know.”

In February 2008, former MÖTLEY CRÜE producer Tom Werman slammed “Heroin Diaries” as “totally deluded” and “stunningly inaccurate.”

In a letter to the New York Times, Werman took issue with Sixx‘s assertion that the producer chatted on the phone during the recording of “Theatre of Pain”, “Shout at the Devil” and “Girls Girls Girls” while Sixx did all the work.

“If this distortion of reality is the result of Sixx‘s past heroin habit, then his diary is truly nothing more than a pipe dream, and the events to which this book refers may simply be the needle-induced fantasies of an attention-starved junkie,” Werman wrote.
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