Pushing 76 years old, not that he looks remotely like it, Elton John is finally coming off the road.

John’s epic, worldwide, farewell stadium tour became an even longer goodbye due to the pandemic, and he’s said, many times now, that he now wants now to be home with his kids. “I don’t want to play live again,” he says over a Zoom call, “because it means I would have to travel.”

He’s also scored several Broadway musicals in the past — “Aida,” “The Lion King,” “Billy Elliot” — so he knows that they have to be wrestled into fruition, require much on-location tinkering and revision, take years to come together (or not) and are, generally, a pain in the neck for someone well past retirement age who has been so busy he couldn’t even make the queen’s Platinum Jubilee in person.

But when your husband is co-producing a Broadway musical with the title “The Devil Wears Prada,” a musical based on a movie where Meryl Streep, playing a thinly veiled version of fashion guru Anna Wintour, eats a dismissive underling played by Anne Hathaway, herself a thinly veiled version of the writer Lauren Weisberger, for breakfast before spitting her remains out for lunch, what’s a happily domesticated pop star gonna say?

“I almost immediately said yes,” John says, grinning. “’Music and fashion go hand in hand, and it’s a great story.“

But “The Devil Wears Prada,” widely seen as an escapist fairy tale that went well with popcorn, comes from the halcyon early aughts, when the world was a different place.

Glossy fashion magazines like Vogue still had colossal influence, the fashion world not yet catering to instant influencers with iPhone 13s but to prestige publications with long lead times. Powerful editors still exhibited outsized power and a frisson of awe, even excitement, still attached itself to the scary, tyrannical, artistic boss. Interns and receptionists still huddled and swapped survival skills. And, of course, the industry itself still trafficked in their consumers’ shrewdly nurtured aspirations when it came to body size and type, not anything approaching everyday reality.

And social consciousness? Wrong industry, darling. Move on downtown.

John nods at that history.

“We sat down and approached the fact that the movie was 20 years ago and a lot has changed. Social media, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter. We thought, we just can’t put in this scenario from 20 years ago. We have to make it modern. We have to bring it up to date. And that appealed to me as well because I wanted to make the music modern. And it’s a woman’s story. So I said I’d like to have a woman as the lyric writer. ... I was sent three brilliant female lyricists and I picked Shaina Taub. It was a good choice. We’ve hit it off so well.”

John started, aptly enough, with a song called “I Mean Business” and then wrote some of the score in London, some of it in Toronto, some of it in Milan. Pretty much wherever he was on tour: “I just finished the last song last week, funnily enough,” he says.

There’s a song about Paris, a title number, a lot of up-tempo numbers in a variety of styles. “I’ve got very catholic tastes,” John says. “I can write all kinds of songs.”

Incontrovertibly. But if you exclude “Don’t Trust That Woman,” written in 1986 with a lyricist known as Cher, a number John’s own spouse and in-house critic, David Furnish, describes as “forgettable,” this collaboration with Taub actually is the first time one of the greatest pop songwriters in history has worked with a female lyricist. That’s especially notable, Furnish says, because John always has composed to preexisting lyrics.

“When I see the written word on a page, I’m off,” John says, agreeing with his husband.

———

“The Devil Wears Prada” runs through Aug. 21 at the Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St., Chicago.