Photo by Kevin Harber

June 2014 is a long way off, but the Kennedy Center is already booked with something pretty remarkable. Two years from now, the Eisenhower Theatre will play host to a new production of Side Show, a Broadway musical about a Vaudeville-era circus act that despite critical adoration in its original 1997 run, closed after just a few months.

And the new production, which will first play at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, is set to be directed by Bill Condon, who helmed the film productions of Chicago and Dreamgirls and is currently in the middle of wrapping up production on some movie about lovelorn teenage vampires.

Side Show retells the story of Violet and Daisy Hilton, a pair of conjoined twins who earned fame through their starring role in circus freak shows but achieved little else outside of the carnival circuit. (True story.)

When the musical first opened, The New York Times’ Ben Brantley wrote that it played upon audiences’ voyeuristic thirst for taking advantage of the malformed for entertainment’s sake:

Robin Wagner’s masterly set, enriched by Brian MacDevitt’s lighting, makes an eloquent case for understatement in big musicals. Its central element is a set of bleachers that are reconfigured throughout the show and are seen by the audience upon entering the theater. Thus the line between the observer and the observed is immediately blurred. And the opening number, in which the members of the freak show take their places wearing only impassive expressions and somber street clothes, is a quiet stunner.

But the new production, set to debut in La Jolla in fall 2013, will be a “re-imagining” of the entire show by its original creators: Bill Russell, who penned the book and lyrics, and composer Henry Krieger.