'Mystic Pizza' to be topped with Melissa Etheridge songs

So now someone else will have to take on a famous Julia Roberts role. Lively McCabe Entertainment announced Tuesday that it's developing a stage adaptation of the 1988 coming-of-age movie "Mystic Pizza," which helped launch Roberts' movie career. Grammy- and Oscar-winning singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge is doing the music.

Timing is uncertain, but it follows closely the adaptation of the 1990 Roberts hit "Pretty Woman," which has been going great guns on Broadway since it opened in August, despite a number of critics dismissing star Samantha Bark's performance as nowhere close to that of Roberts.

Gordon Greenberg will direct and write the screenplay for "Mystic Pizza" with Sas Goldberg, basing it on the story and characters of original screenwriter Amy Holden Jones. Greenberg said in a statement that the film is seminal "for an entire generation of young people looking to distinguish themselves in a rapidly changing world." He called Etheridge "a beacon of strength and raw musical energy."

While we wait for more details, we can start wondering who'll nab the Roberts role, a free-spirited waitress in a Connecticut pizza restaurant. And while we're at, they'll also have to find that very young lobster eater, played in the movie by an 18-year-old Matt Damon in his Hollywood debut.