10 Things I Hate About You Musical Lands Broadway Premiere Date

The 10 Things I Hate About You musical now has a date pencilled into the Broadway calendar: performances begin 17 August 2027, with Carly Rae Jepsen and Lena Dunham at the creative helm of what promises to be one of the more unexpected stage adaptations in recent memory. Casting, theatre and further production details have not yet been announced.

Jepsen is writing the score alongside Ethan Gruska, a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer whose credits include his work on boygenius’ album The Record, which took Best Alternative Music Album at the 2024 Grammy Awards. Dunham, meanwhile, is writing the book with playwright Jessica Huang. The pairing of a confessional pop sensibility with a theatrical literary hand feels deliberate: the 1999 film it is drawn from always had one foot in high-school social realism and the other in something more heightened and self-aware.

A Production Team That Carries Some Weight

The creative assembly around the 10 Things I Hate About You musical is unlikely to be dismissed as a vanity project. Christopher Wheeldon, a two-time Tony Award winner for his choreography on An American in Paris and MJ, is directing and choreographing the production. Serving as music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator is Tom Kitt, himself a two-time Tony and Grammy winner who also holds a Pulitzer Prize for Next to Normal, according to Broadway.com. That particular combination of theatrical rigour and pop instinct is a reasonable fit for source material that has always been warmer and stranger than its teen-comedy classification suggests.

The original 10 Things I Hate About You, released in 1999, starred the late Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik. It transplanted Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew into a Seattle-area high school, following sisters Kat and Bianca Stratford as they navigated parental rules, romance and adolescent social dynamics. The film’s intelligence has kept it in circulation long past the usual shelf life of its genre: the Shakespearean scaffolding gave it a structure and a moral seriousness that the best of the era’s pop soundtracks could only gesture towards. A musical adaptation feels less like exploitation of nostalgia and more like a logical next step for material that was always halfway to the stage.

Jepsen’s Busy 2027 and What Precedes It

Jepsen arrives at this project in an unusually prolific period. Her next album, Day and Night, is a 24-track double album structured across two halves: 12 songs for the daylight hours, 12 for after dark. It is due for release on 18 September through Interscope. The ambition of that release, thematically divided and sprawling in length, suggests an artist comfortable working at scale, which bodes well for the demands of a full Broadway score.

Dunham, for her part, has been a visible presence beyond television for some time. Her 2026 memoir Famesick debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, according to Rolling Stone, confirming that her audience has followed her across formats. Writing a Broadway book requires a specific discipline, and Huang’s presence as co-writer suggests a conscious grounding in theatrical craft.

What the 10 Things I Hate About You musical needs to resolve, eventually, is tone. The film’s comedy comes partly from irony and partly from genuine feeling, and the tension between those two registers is what gives it its lasting appeal. Whether Jepsen and Gruska’s score leans into the sardonic or the sincere will determine whether the thing has a life beyond opening night. The first performance in August 2027 will settle the question.