Sparks’ Ron and Rus­sell Mael have writ­ten anoth­er orig­i­nal musi­cal film

As the song says: we love Baby Annette. With last year’s film-opera-fan­ta­sia direct­ed by Leos Carax, the mad­men song­writ­ers of cult band Sparks — indi­vid­u­al­ly, broth­ers Ron and Rus­sell Mael — gave the cin­e­ma one of the most accom­plished orig­i­nal musi­cals of the mod­ern era, and those fans starved for more of their con­ver­sa­tion­al yet elab­o­rate lyri­cism or undu­lat­ing melodies won’t have to wait until the Hyper­bowl for more.

Last night, Dead­line broke the news that the men of Sparks are hard at work on anoth­er orig­i­nal-con­cept musi­cal as writ­ers and pro­duc­ers, still in search of a direc­tor for the project announced as X Cru­cior. Such known asso­ciates as Carax or Edgar Wright seem unlike­ly, as that could’ve been con­firmed to go along with this announce­ment, so it’s anyone’s guess as to who else pos­sess­es the ver­sa­til­i­ty to do right by Sparks’ high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic music.

As recount­ed in last year’s doc­u­men­tary The Sparks Broth­ers, Mael and Mael got their start in the ​’60s under the moniker Halfnel­son before revis­ing to Sparks (a play on the Marx Broth­ers), attract­ing the atten­tion of pro­duc­er Todd Rund­gren and a grow­ing under­ground fan­base with their byzan­tine, allu­sive, com­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty. They’d spend the next six decades of con­sis­tent work cul­ti­vat­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as off-kil­ter genius­es to those in the know, becom­ing art-rock leg­ends’ art-rock legends.

The plot details of X Cru­cior — or what that phrase even means — remain shroud­ed in mys­tery, but the descrip­tion of the film as an ​“epic” invites rec­ol­lec­tions of the high tragedy and ambi­tious scope of Annette, a globe-trot­ting mod­ern Greek myth of desire, rage, and intri­cate piano solos. And if any one song in the new film has the instant­ly-unfor­get­table wal­lop of ​“So May We Start,” it will be more than worth the wait.

But the most press­ing mat­ter is still that of who could direct what’ll sure­ly be anoth­er slip­pery con­cept requir­ing excep­tion­al tonal con­trol. Feel free to con­tribute your own wish­list, but ours would prob­a­bly start with Brady Cor­bet, whose polar­iz­ing Vox Lux demon­strat­ed an inter­est in uncon­ven­tion­al musi­cal forms and big, baro­que­ly-pre­sent­ed ideas.