Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo Premiere of the Musical, “Invincible”

It’s just days after our Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony when we find Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo holed up in the green room of the Beverly Hills Performing Arts Center, talking about how their big night has gone through town. “Eight minutes and 30 seconds!” exclaimed Geraldo, speaking of the exact length to which their performance had to come. They broke our balls: “You can’t have 8:38; You should have 8:30. So we had to do a little mix, and Patricia said, “How will we ever remember (the edits), when we’ve been doing these songs for 35 years?” We’re a little old now — we just want it to be automatic,” he admits.

Ironically, however, the newly recruited husband and wife have a project in the works Not Wanting to hear the same songs the same way. On one floor at the Wallis Center, a team of about 30 actors is at work rehearsing “Indomitable – The Musical,” a new stage production put together around a song score by Benatar and Giraldo, most of it taken from a taped catalog they pulled out of. The Gate directly in 1979, along with several newly written pieces.

The musical officially premieres Friday night at Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater in Beverly Hills, after a week of previews. (Limited participation runs through December 18, ticket information can be found here.) over here.) that it Not They say it’s musical – starting with the fact that they hand-picked some deep album tracks and B-sides as well as the songs, then made it sound really theatrical. “I’ve heard on these records that we’ve done enough,” says Giraldo. “I was excited to do the syncopation because I wanted to have multiple polyrhythms and chord sections that do a lot of the tricky stuff. Originally I wanted to take it really far, but other people said, ‘No, you have to round it out a little bit,’ so we have some guitar. “

“Invincible” is a re-imagining of “Romeo and Juliet,” but unlike, say, the closest modern equivalent in terms of catalog-based Broadway musicals, the Go-Gos-based “Head Over Heels,” which is set in ages Central, this show is mostly made for dark drama, not laughs. Discography that includes high dramatic numbers like “Hell Is for Children” is well suited to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Benatar and Giraldo say.

So no “hit me with your best shot” then? “We have one chorus that comes in the middle of another song, just in honor of everyone who would go crazy if we didn’t have it,” says Benatar, “but it’s literally there for 10 seconds.” (She made headlines last year for kicking her out of her concerts because she couldn’t sing a light-hearted song even with metaphorical “shots” without thinking about the parents mourning the school shooting.)

Benatar and Giraldo spent a great deal of time developing a very different musical, a biography that was to focus on the first few years of their professional and personal partnership, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the singer says, “At this point in our lives, you’ve had a lot of you, you’re way over it. I’m starting to feel like the genre has come to a dead end, and the gold standard has really been reached with ‘Jersey Boys.'”

Meanwhile, they learn that a writer and producer named Bradley Bredeweg composed the play “Romeo and Juliet” using their songs in a small, unauthorized Los Angeles theater. A cease and desist order was sent out, but there was one problem: colleagues who went to see the show told them it was actually good. Forces are joined, and after six years of further development, this extensively adapted version is premiering under the direction of Tiffany Nicole Green (who directed the touring version of “Hamilton”).

So they are It was They produced a version of their own lives, what could the story arc have been? Well… Shakespeare is also minus the tragedy.

“Facing the record company as a duo, that’s when Romeo and Juliet started,” Benatar recalls, “because they thought we were cool until we hit it off romantically (after creating her first album). Then they weren’t happy, because they thought it would be down the Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham way and ruin everything.” That thing where they happened, or worse, that we both would be so strong together that they wouldn’t be able to control us individually, that’s when they went crazy and tried every way they could to break us up.”

Forty-three years later, Capulet and Montague have outlived poison and lived together to receive the highest honor. Their enduring love story, Ben Attar says, “isn’t without its challenges, and it’s not like there aren’t days I want to strangle him. I’m sure he wants to kill me most days. But we made a pact and we stick to it, we’re family, and we’re still crazy about each other.”