Dreamgirls
1981 Broadway musical
Dreamgirls is a Broadway musical, with music by Henry Krieger and lyrics and book by Tom Eyen. It is based on the show business aspirations and successes of R&B acts such as The Shirelles, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and others, and particularly The Supremes, as the musical follows the story of a young Black female singing trio from Chicago, Illinois called "The Dreams", who become music superstars.
Staged with a mostly African-American cast and originally starring Jennifer Holliday, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Loretta Devine, Ben Harney, Cleavant Derricks, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Obba Babatundé, the musical opened on December 20, 1981, at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. The musical was then nominated for 13 Tony Awards, including the Tony Award for Best Musical, and won six. It was later adapted into a motion picture from DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures in 2006, starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose, and Keith Robinson.
Background
Dreamgirls had its beginnings as a project for Nell Carter. Playwright Tom Eyen and conductor Henry Krieger first worked together on the 1975 musical version of Eyen's play The Dirtiest Show in Town. Carter appeared in the musical, and her performance inspired Eyen and Krieger to craft a musical about black back-up singers, which was originally called One Night Only and then given the working title of Project #9. Project #9 was workshopped for Joseph Papp; Nell Carter was joined at this time by Sheryl Lee Ralph and Loretta Devine, who were to play her groupmates. The project was shelved after Carter departed to appear in the soap opera Ryan's Hope in 1978.
The public source identifies “Dreamgirls” as 1981 Broadway musical. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dreamgirls, Broadway and musical.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1140966. VIAF identifies the subject as 274202708. The Library of Congress control number is n2007079434. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981, 2006, 1975 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dreamgirls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.