A Steve Jobs musical is coming and he would have hated the name

Steve Jobs may well have hated the name of an upcoming musical about his life and work as Apple chief executive. Called The Crazy Ones, the musical gets its name from the script of an Apple commercial which Jobs once described as "s**t".

Just when you thought two films and two high-profile biographies – plus many more – had covered the story of Steve Jobs in enough detail, the new musical opens in New York on 15 March.

Described by Broadway World as "a thrilling new original pop-rock musical", The Crazy Ones starts in 1982, when Jobs was head of Apple Computers and at a time when the company was busy developing the iconic Lisa (which he named after his daughter) and original Macintosh computers.

As with every book, film and TV documentary ever written about Jobs, The Crazy Ones claims to tell the story "of the man behind the genius and how he strove to leave behind a legacy, despite some very powerful demons."

The show is being directed by Hunter Bird and written by Alex Pototsky, while the pop-rock music score comes from Zack Zadek.

But Jobs might not have been too keen on the title. The Crazy Ones gets its name from a 1997 TV advert of the same name by Apple. The advert, which in one form was narrated by Jobs himself, begins: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo... the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

The quote neatly sums up the thinking of Apple and Jobs himself, but according to Rob Siltanen, the man who was creative director of the ad agency used by Apple to produce the commercial, Jobs thought the script was "s**t". Siltanen told Forbes shortly after Jobs' death in 2011 that the Apple boss was "blatantly harsh on the commercial", and "far from the mastermind" behind the script, which went on to introduce the company's famous "Think different" ad campaign.

Maybe Jobs would have preferred the title of an upcoming opera, also about his life, called The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, which will open in 2017.