“Life is short. Why rush?”

Credit: Alliance Theatre

Credit: Alliance Theatre

Guettel partnered with Bob Martin (“The Drowsy Chaperone”), who wrote the book for the musical, and director Bartlett Sher (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), who helped shape it. All three are Tony Award winners.

The story centers on 9-year-old Damian (Keenan Barrett) and his 12-year-old brother Anthony (Yair Keydar), who find a mysterious bag stuffed with cash. Still coping with the recent death of their mother, the boys aren’t sure what to do with it. But the thief who stole it (Atlantan Shuler Hensley) wants it back and will go to any lengths to get it.

Leigh Ellen Jones, Ruthie Ann Miles and Steven Pasquale also star.

The first big change Martin and Guettel made to the story was to relocate it from England to New Mexico, which got rid of some confusing plot points about British pounds being converted to Euros.

“When you do an adaptation, you’re inventing an entirely new thing,” says Martin. “Fairly early on in the adaptation process, the piece starts to take on its own life. The important things about the story have to be decided on, and certain things have to be let go.

Credit: Alliance Theatre

Credit: Alliance Theatre

“We’ve tried to make this an extremely recognizable, very real situation for this family living in New Mexico in the present.”

While the location has been changed, the story’s reliance on Catholic saints remains very much intact. Damian’s late mother was Catholic, and the confused boy turns to the saints in his books to help him make sense of the world. The saints, in turn, appear and are completely real to him.

“It’s a modern morality tale, but it’s not a religious story,” says Martin. “These saints exist because Damian manifests them as a way of dealing with grief. He doesn’t completely understand the dogma of the Catholic Church or anything like that. He collects them like baseball players, and when he’s in a difficult place, he talks to them about his situation.”

Says Guettel, “These two little boys are trying to piece their lives back together after losing their mother, and they’re also sort of running for their lives because they’re being pursued.”

The grandson of theater great Richard Rodgers, Guettel describes the music in “Millions” as more of a rock score than his previous shows.

Credit: Alliance Theatre

Credit: Alliance Theatre

“There’s a lot of rock, drums and guitar and so forth, and there’s also a synthesizer component,” he says, “that is far more exotic. For what people might be expecting from me, these are much more like pop songs.”

Atlanta actor Shuler Hensley plays The Thief, the only character who doesn’t have a name.

“He’s not named because he’s a sort of symbol for evil,” says Martin. “Shuler plays him as a blood thirsty human, with real reasons for being a murderer. His story is all about the gray area that we all live in.”

From his experience playing villains, Hensley says the way to make them resonate is to give them relatable character traits.

“Adam’s song that the thief sings has a lot of basic truths about human nature that everyone recognizes. So it’s not like some guy coming in here just twisting his mustache and laughing evilly,” he says.

Hensley, who won Tony and Olivier awards for playing Jud Fry in the 2002 revival of “Oklahoma!,” grew up in Marietta and now divides his time with his family among Atlanta, New York and England. While he was in Atlanta rehearsing for “Millions” last month, he took time away to host the 17th annual ArtsBridge Foundation’s 2025 Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards at the Cobb Energy Centre, which are named the Shuler Awards in his honor.

Despite years of being deeply involved in Atlanta theater, this is only Hensley’s second time on the Alliance stage, following 2012’s Southern gothic musical “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.” That much anticipated project, with a book by Stephen King and songs by John Cougar Mellencamp, was an earlier attempt by the Alliance to stand up a new musical for a possible Broadway run, just as “Millions” is.

Sometimes these big-budget Alliance co-productions successfully move to Broadway or London’s West End, as with the recent success of “Water for Elephants,” but sometimes the shows, like “Ghost Brothers,” don’t make it.

Asked about the potential future of “Millions” after it plays the Alliance, Martin cites the first rule of “Fight Club”: “Don’t talk about fight club.”

“We are aiming for Broadway,” he says. “But Broadway at this point in history is a very difficult place to be [financially].”

He hearkens back to “The Prom,” which Martin cowrote for an Alliance premiere in 2016 before it went to Broadway in 2018 and then became a Netflix movie.

“I feel the same way about ‘Millions’ that I did about ‘Prom,’” Martin says. “I really want ‘Millions’ to be out there in the community and to have kids play Damian and Anthony in a high school production or community theater production. That’s what I find really exciting about it.”

Theater preview

“Millions.” May 9-June 15. $40-$130. Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404- 733-4600. www.alliancetheatre.org.