Frasier star plans to play FBI boss Hoover

The Frasier star has put aside six months to star in a London run of the comedy next year.

But the creators of the show, including Simpsons star Harry Shearer, still need a UK producer to premiere the show here.

Shearer collaborated with former Cheers and Seinfeld writer Tom Leopold and the late Broadway composer Peter Matz to create the musical.

It has been produced on the radio in America, and there has been a staged reading at the Aspen Comedy Festival. In both versions Grammer has played Hoover, and Roseanne star John Goodman has played his lifelong partner, Clyde Toulson. Other cast members have included Shearer and his Spinal Tap co-star Christopher Guest.

Shearer said the show was a love story between Hoover and Toulson, played out against ‘Hoover's rise and reign as the single most powerful government figure in the history of the US’.

‘The intimate plot details of the Hoover-Clyde affair, and the unrequited yearning of Hoover's longtime secretary Helen for her boss, are comic inventions,’ he added. ‘But the political activity of this homophobic homosexual as depicted in the show is fact-based.’

Published: 5 Oct 2007