Gary Graff of Billboard.com reports:

TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA is gearing up for its annual holiday tour, but founder Paul O'Neill is still eyeballing the group's impending move to Broadway.

O'Neill says that he and his creative partners have two rock musicals in the works for the Great White Way. 'Romanov: What Kings Must Whisper', a rock opera about the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1918, is "the furthest along, just because it's completely written and scored and ready to go." Romanov was actually supposed to be TSO's first album in 1994, he says, "but a number of people who have a lot of credibility on Broadway heard it and said it's too good to just go and do a record. It should be a Broadway musical, and I always wanted to take on Broadway, so we pulled it back."

Also on tap is 'Gutter Ballet', which O'Neill started as a 1989 album for the group SAVATAGE. He and Savatage frontman Jon Oliva plan to "rewrite some songs" from the original album. "We used some of the themes on other projects already," O'Neill notes, "but we won't do the same song in two different rock operas."

There's no hard and fast deadline for either endeavor to hit the stage, but O'Neill says that in both cases TSO will release an album before the production opens. "We'll do the opposite of the normal Broadway thing," he explains. "Usually a musical goes up on Broadway and then they release the cast album. We're going to release the album and then go on Broadway." Before anything happens, though, O'Neill says he has to "find the right voice to go with the right character," a painstaking process that sometimes takes a back seat to TSO's touring concerns.

"My biggest problem is simply time," he says with a laugh. "I need to get one of those magical stopwatches where time freezes and I can play catchup. But after we finish the winter tour, technically we have January off. So we're going to take a look and figure out where to concentrate our forces and where to concentrate the talent and what to do next."

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