The Rascals Reunited by Van Zandt: 60's Soul Group to Do Broadway Show Together in "Once Upon a Dream" Thanks to Their Biggest Fan

1960's soul group, "The Rascals," will reunite on the Broadway stage this spring in a show called "Once Upon a Dream," thanks to one of the band's biggest fans, Steven Van Zandt.

The Associated Press reports that the original members of the soul quartet - singer Eddie Brigati, keyboardist Felix Cavaliere, guitarist Gene Cornish and drummer Dino Danelli - will reunite for what producers call "a hybrid of a rock 'n' roll concert and a Broadway show."

The recently reunited band who brought us hits like "It's a Beautiful Morning," "Good Lovin," and "People Got to be Free" is set to play 15 performances at the Richard Rodgers Theater beginning next month on April 15th. "Once Upon a Dream" is show combining live performance, video reenactments, archival concert and news footage, op-art backdrops and psychedelic lighting, notes AP.

The Broadway show features nearly 30 Rascals songs and also explores the group's influence on more than just music. The band was known to fight discrimination by demanding that a black act appear on the bill at each of their concerts.

Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist of "Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band," came up with the idea to bring one of his favorite bands back together on the Broadway stage in order to repay the formerly known "Young Rascals" for all that they have given the musician.

Van Zandt attended his first ever live concert in 1965 at a skating rink in Keyport, N.J. Headlining that night was The Young Rascals, who were promoting their hit "Good Lovin'." It was that night that Van Zandt met the young Bruce Springsteen where the two jersey natives would "bond over the classic American blue-eyed soul band" that brought them together, Star Tribune states.

"I'll never forget it. It was the most exciting night ever," says Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. "They were phenomenal live, really quite different than anybody else. And very, very influential to this day."

Van Zandt shares directing duties with visual designer Marc Brickman, and he says the show marks a new phenomenon for Broadway: not a musical like "Jersey Boys" and also not a concert by, say, Frankie Valli.

He calls it a "bio concert" and thinks it could be the wave of the future. "This could be a new form and a new industry," he says. "We got 'Jersey Boys' with the Four Seasons in it."

Van Zandt also inducted the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 1997 and has worked hard to reunite them ever since.

"The Rascals created music that inspired a generation - and that feeling has lived on through their original fans and the legions of new fans that have discovered their music over the years," Van Zandt said in a statement.