John Belushi's cult comedy 'Animal House' is coming to Broadway. The New York Post reported yesterday (March 5, 2012), on the 30th anniversary of his tragic death. Universal Pictures have announced that the 1978 frat-party comedy has been taken up by the playwright Michael Mitnick and director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw.

The Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies have been signed up to write the score for the musical, which will revisit the characters of John Blutarsky and Chip Diller and their Delta Tau Chi fraternity pals. One of the original producers of the film (and founder of the National Lampoon magazine), Matty Simmons, is on board as executive producer of the project. James Nederlander, of the Nederlander Organization will serve as a producer on the show and hope to make it as successful as his previous ventures, such as Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. The casting for the show has, so far been kept under wraps, so it is unclear who will take on Belushi's popular role as Blutarsky.

John Belushi was a well-known comic actor in the 1970s and early 1980s, until his untimely death in 1982. He was known for his regular work on Saturday Night Live and appeared in a number of the National Lampoon shows, on stage, radio and in the cinemas. In 1980, he starred alongside Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers. On March 5, 1982, John Belushi was found dead in his room, after injecting a combination of heroin and cocaine, known as a 'speedball.'