Dolly Parton‘s Broadway musical is coming to Nashville! The global superstar reveals that Dolly: An Original Musical, will spend four weeks at Belmont University’s Fisher Center. Preview performances will begin on July 18, with opening night currently set for August 8. The show will close in Nashville on August 17, and begin in Broadway in 2026.
“The performances here are going to start on Friday, July 18, for a four-week run,” Parton shared at a press conference, adding why she chose Music City to premiere the show. “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.”
For the East Tennessee native, there wasn’t a better place than Nashville for her to kick off her Broadway show.
“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,” she says. “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.”
Parton is very hands-on in every aspect of casting Dolly: An Original Musical, including choosing who will play the titular role.
View this post on Instagram
“We’re going to be auditioning people, and we still are all the way through,” Parton revealed. “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.”
The 79-year-old admits she has been pleasantly surprised by the volume of applicants interested in portraying her life on Broadway.
“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.”
The Grand Ole Opry member will use several of her own songs in Dolly: An Original Musical. But she has also penned several new tracks just for the show.
“I’ve lived my life, and my life has been country,” Parton says. “I’m known for being a country girl, living a country life … It’s only natural that the new music that I’ve written kind of has that flavor, and it carries on different stories and parts of my life. A lot of the stuff, we’ve got some bigger songs that have been tailor-made to how I thought Broadway would be, but still keeping that country flavor and the instruments. We use all country instruments, the country sound. I wanted it to be about this country girl.”
Having a Broadway musical is an entirely new venture for Parton. But in typical Parton fashion, she is excited to tackle the new adventure.
“People are going to love it, I think,” she hints. “And I think they’ll appreciate me taking Nashville to New York and all those country sounds. It wasn’t a big leap to write the new stuff. I just followed along with what my life had been, and the stories I’ve wanted to tell. When I had the chance to do something bigger and broader, I thought, ‘I get to have an orchestra! It’s going to be great. I get to have strings on this.’ It was exciting and fun for me to write the new stuff.”
Parton is also writing a book about her life, working alongside Maria S. Schlatter. Dolly: An Original Musical, is directed by Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher.
Tickets are available now at DollyMusical.com.