[Enter stage left: a rotund man in braces]


Entire Cast and Audience: NORM!

[Pause for applause]

Yes, the bar where everyone knows your name could be coming to a theatre near you, with a live version of the classic sitcom Cheers in the works and expected next year.

US network CBS is planning stage shows based on Cheers, 70s family comedy The Brady Bunch and Corduroy (no, us neither). While The Brady Bunch will be a musical appropriate to its peppy source material, Cheers Live On Stage will ‘showcase classic moments’ from the iconic sitcom, although it’s not yet clear whether any of the original cast will be involved when it begins touring next year.

Cheers starred Ted Danson as womanising bar tender Sam, Woody Harrelson as his dimwitted colleague Woody, Shelley Long and Rhea Pearlman as feuding waitresses Diane and Carla, Kirstie Alley as bar manager Rebecca, George Wendt and John Ratzenberger as barflies Norm and Cliff and Kelsey Grammer as regular Dr Frasier Crane.

The show went off the air in 1993 after 11 years and 27 Emmys. Of course, real fans know a stage revival has already happened, back in 1996.

* ahem *

In the spin-off show Frasier (season three episode 14) the psychiatrist’s pompous, self-obsessed ex-wife Diane shows up. Turns out she’s staging an off-off-off Broadway show, ‘Rhapsody and Requiem’, the set of which bears more than a passing to a certain bar.


So Cheers Live on Stage is really just art imitating fictional art imitating life. It’s enough to drive you to drink.