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Disney knows a good thing when it sees it. The studio has adapted Mary Rodgers’ 1972 children’s novel “Freaky Friday” into a feature film three times, a stage musical once and now a TV movie for Disney Channel, premiering Aug. 10 at 8 p.m. Et/Pt.

And the company can identify a good team too. When Disney Theatrical Prods. developed the stage version in 2016, producers turned to the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning composing team of Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (lyrics). The book was written by Bridget Carpenter. Disney decided to keep the collaborators together for the TV adaptation.

“Tom and Brian are the perfect team for ‘Freaky Friday,’” says Thomas Schumacher, president and producer of Disney Theatrical. “Their connection to the Mary Rodgers novel was deep, and they’ve provided the show with a score that’s funny, moving and wise.”

Indeed, Kitt and Yorkey had been longtime fans of the material.

“You Never Know” It was fate, the story goes, that brought together composer Tom Kitt and writer/lyricist Brian Yorkey in the spring of 1994.Kitt had been recruited for the Columbia soccer team and was studying economics, but felt himself being pulled, instead, in the direction of a musical career. One night, in search of a musician to assist with a crisis at Columbia’s famed “Varsity Show,” Kitt’s future wife, the actress Rita Pietropinto, knocked on his door for help. Kitt saved the day, and met Yorkey, a “Varsity Show” veteran, in the process. The rest was history. “Every day we make choices,” Kitt says. “Sometimes they’re just small choices and sometimes they’re bigger ones. But we often wonder about the power of those choices and whether our life would have turned out the way it did.” “If we look back to where we met, there...

Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno's Little Kings, a romantic comedy about three Italian-Americans, was named best feature at the ninth annual Palm Beach International Film Festival, which concluded Thursday night with an awards ceremony hosted by John C. McGinley of NBC's Scrubs. Other winners included: best documentary, Timothy Gorski's Lolita: Slave to Entertainment; best director, Chris Philpott for Fairytales & Pornography; and best actor and actress, Dominic Pace and Rita Pietropinto, both for Little Kings.