The much acclaimed classic comedy "Animal House" is set to be produced as a Broadway musical, as Universal Pictures Stage Productions announced on Monday, March 5^th. The 1978 John Landis gross-out genre comedy will have an original score by Canadian alternative-rock band Barenaked Ladies and a book by playwright Michael Mitnick, based on a screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller. Meanwhile, Tony Award winner for The Book of Mormon, Casey Nicholaw has signed on as director and choreographer.

Also on board as producer is James L. Nederlander, president of theater group the Nederlander Organization, and also producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel, who previously worked on Universal's stage successes The Merchant of Venice and The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess are collaborating for the show. National Lampoon founding publisher Matty Simmons, who was a producer (with Ivan Reitman) of the 1978 feature, will serve as executive producer on the stage project.

"Animal House" movie starred John Belushi, Tom Hulce, Stephen Furst, Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen, John Vernon, Donald Sutherland and Kevin Bacon, in his first film role. It was budgeted at a mere $2.7 million and went on to gross $141.6 million domestically. John Belushi was a well-known comic actor in the 1970s and early 1980s, until his untimely death in 1982. He was known for his regular work on "Saturday Night Live" and appeared in a number of the National Lampoon shows, on stage, radio and in the cinemas. In 1980, he starred alongside Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers. On March 5, 1982, John Belushi was found dead in his room, after injecting a combination of heroin and cocaine, known as a 'speedball.'