It's hard to be Dolly Parton. The 79-year-old is opening up about the actors auditioning to portray her in Dolly: An Original Musical.
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"We're going to be auditioning people, and we still are all the way through," Parton reveals in a press conference. "But you would not believe some of the stuff we've got. We've got some absolutely great people. We have drag queens. We have all kinds of people playing Dolly. Like they were going to get in. You get to do that at the nightclubs across the street. I don't even know if some of them were that serious about it. But we really hope to find just the right people."
Three different people will be cast to play Parton at different stages throughout her life and career.
"We'll be announcing pretty soon ...we appreciate all the people who have applied for the job, because it's a hard job," Parton says. "I don't believe I'd want to live it again. But we're proud of the fact that people are so interested, that we got just thousands and thousands of people."
Dolly: An Original Musical Premiere
Parton's Dolly: An Original Musical will hit Broadway in 2026. But before it heads to New York City, the show will premiere in Nashville, at Belmont University's Fisher Center.
"The performances here are going to start on Friday, July 18, for a four-week run," Parton says. "Nashville has certainly been home to me for over 60 years; it's been my musical home. Even before that, I used to come back and forth as a kid when I was singing in the backseat. That was my bedroom. And my uncle had the front bedroom of our car that we used to come back and forth to Nashville that we used since I was a kid trying to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and trying to get started in the music business. So, it's supposed to premiere here and then go to Broadway in 2026."
The news was surprising to many. But to Parton, there is nowhere else but Nashville where she would want to give fans a first look of a musical about her.
"It just seemed natural and right for me to premiere the story of my life in Tennessee, 'cause I'm Tennessee-born and Tennessee-raised," the Country Music Hall of Fame member explains. "We will be doing lots of songs that you know in the musical. But I've written a whole lot of original songs, and I'm having a whole lot of fun."
Tickets can be found at DollyMusical.com.
