Playbill
New Musical Platinum Dreams Sets Off-Broadway Premiere
By Margaret Hall
Feb 13, 2025

The York Theatre will stage the new musical Platinum Dreams later this spring as the first production in its 2025 New2NY lineup.

Running April 8-16, Platinum Dreams features a book by Stevie Holland, music by Gary William Friedman, lyrics by Will Holt, and additional lyrics by Holland. Adapted from Platinum by Holt and Bruce Vilanch, and Sunset by Holt, Platinum Dreams will be directed by York Interim Artistic Director Joseph Hayward.

Set in 1977, with a score encompassing ’70s rock, ’40s big band, and a contemporary theatre sound, Platinum Dreams tells the story of Lila Halliday, a musical movie star of the 1940s hoping to make a comeback by recording her first-ever solo album; Dan Hardin, a hot rock ‘n’ roll star looking to keep his relevance on the charts; and Jamie Stiles, a record producer and studio owner who is Dan’s former writing partner and former lover.

The production will star Stevie Holland (Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter) as Lila Halliday, Conor Ryan (Desperate Measures, Moulin Rouge) as Dan Hardin, and Jovan E’Sean (Cats: “The Jellicle Ball”) as Jamie Stiles.

Kody Jauron is choreographing, with music direction by Dave Klodowski. The production is presented in association with 150 Music Productions, Lyle Saunders, Ken Inadomi, and Melinda Wolfe. Casting is by Michael Cassara Casting. Meg Meschino is production stage manager and Nicole Caroselli is assistant stage manager.

Visit YorkTheatre.org.

The post New Musical Platinum Dreams Sets Off-Broadway Premiere first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Redditt
I’m Bruce Vilanch, the Comedy Writer Behind 25 Years of Oscars Ceremonies—AMA!
By Staff
January 30, 2025

It is I, Bruce Vilanch—comedy writer, Emmy winner, and the man responsible for countless Oscars zingers (the good, the bad, and the “what were they thinking?!”). I wrote for 25 Academy Awards ceremonies, collaborating with hosts like Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, and Billy Crystal. In 2000, I became the show’s head writer, steering the laughs until 2014.

Beyond the Oscars, I’ve crafted comedy for the Tonys, Grammys, and Emmys, written alongside Roger Ebert at the Chicago Tribune, and penned Bette Midler’s iconic farewell serenade to Johnny Carson—an Emmy-winning moment. I held court as a head writer (and a literal square) for four years on Hollywood Squares next to my pal Whoopi Goldberg.

I’ve also contributed to TV history in other ways—writing for Donny & Marie, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, and yes, the infamously disastrous Star Wars Holiday Special. On the bright side, I’ve written jokes for legends like Lily Tomlin, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Rosie O’Donnell, and even Steven Tyler of Aerosmith.

I’ll be online tomorrow, Thursday, January 30th, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. PST. Ask me about the Oscars, Hollywood’s best (and worst) moments, or my long, strange career. Start dropping questions now, and I’ll answer them tomorrow!

And if you want even more, check out my podcast, The Oscars…What Were They Thinking?! on Spotify, Apple, or all other platforms here.

Oh, and I’ve got a new book—It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, which explores my adventures in comedy (and infamy). You can pre-order it now.

To read the Q & A Click Here

The post Bruce Vilanch’s AMA Subreddit Interview January 30, 2025 first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

We Got Bruce
Bruce Vilanch To Receive REAF’s Lifetime Achievement Award 7/14/2024
By Mister D
July 10, 2024

The Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation presents Help is on the Way: 30th Anniversary Concert & Gala on Sunday, July 14, 2024, at the Marines’ Memorial Theater (concert) and Beacon Grand Hotel (VIP after party with the cast). This show will feature cast members for the Broadway touring cast of Mrs. Doubtfire, with the lead actor, Rob McClure, hosting the evening as Mrs. Doubtfire.

This year’s event, honoring Bruce Vilanch (Lifetime Achievement Award) and Delta Dental of California (Corporate Partner Award), whose support has never required pulling teeth, will be preceded by a silent auction in the theater lobby and a VIP After-Party at the nearby Beacon Grand Hotel.

In 1994, the groundbreaking decision was made to cast openly gay, HIV-positive Cuban-American Pedro Zamora as part of MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco. Zamora’s time in the Real World house on Lombard Street brought a face to the AIDS crisis. The darkly handsome, funny, surprising, and in-your-face activist died at 22 just after the final episode aired.

That same year, Peggy Ermet lost her son to AIDS and joined lifelong friend Barbara Richmond, whose son John died in 1990, to launch a special kind of musical AIDS benefit to honor their sons — it would become Help Is on the Way: San Francisco Cares. Later in 1999, REAF began the “One Night Only” cabaret performances utilizing touring casts of Broadway shows appearing in San Francisco. These fantastic nights give the entertainers a break from the scores they perform every night by offering their chosen music.

Help Is On The Way: 30th ANNIVERSARY: BROADWAY & BEYOND
6:30 pm: Limited silent auction in the theater lobby
7:30 pm: Performance
9:45 pm: VIP After party with the cast at the new
BEACON GRAND HOTEL, 450 Powell St. at Sutter (formerly The Drake)
for tickets or additional info: REAF-SF
$39 – Reserved, Performance only/ Balcony tickets
$59 – Reserved, Performance only/ Dress Circle tickets
$150 – Reserved, Performance & VIP After Party/ Orchestra tickets
$500 & up: – VIP & Gala Individual Sponsor Tickets 

JASON BROCK Top 10 from X-Factor/cabaret star
DEBBY BOONE Grammy Award-winning recording star
DAVID BURNHAM Broadway Star (Light in the Piazza, Wicked)
FAITH PRINCE Tony Award-winning (Guys & Dolls) Broadway Star
LISA VROMAN Broadway Star (Phantom of the Opera, Les Miz)
JENNIFER LEIGH WARREN Broadway Star (Big River)
PAULA WEST Jazz / Cabaret Star
BRUCE VILANCH Broadway (Hairspray) / TV Star Comedian
CAST MEMBERS from the BROADWAY TOURING CAST of MRS. DOUBTFIRE
Featuring Rob McClure hosting as Mrs. Doubtfire

Musical Director MICHAEL ORLAND
Producers: KEN HENDERSON & JOE SEILER
Honorees: BRUCE VILANCH, Performer Lifetime Achievement Award)
DELTA DENTAL OF CALIFORNIA, Corporate Partner Award

The post Bruce Vilanch To Receive REAF’s Lifetime Achievement Award 7/14/2024 first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Playbill
Chilina Kennedy, Crystal Lucas-Perry, Ryan Silverman, More Set for Sign of the Times Reading
By Andrew Gans
October 10, 2023

An industry reading of the new musical A Sign of the Times, featuring the songs of Petula Clark and other pop hits of the 1960s, will be presented October 20 at 2 PM at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Gabriel Barre (Almost Maine, The Wild Party) will direct the reading, presented for potential investors in a 2024 New York City production that features revised material since the 2018 Delaware Theatre Company staging.

The upcoming reading will feature Chilina Kennedy (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) as Cindy, Tony nominee Crystal Lucas-Perry (1776) as Tanya, Ryan Silverman (The Phantom of the Opera) as Brian, Justin Matthew Sargent (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) as Matt, and Alex Joseph Grayson (Parade) as Cody, with Melessie Clark, Jeremy Gaston (Aladdin), Tyler Hanes (Cats), Maggie McDowell (Disaster!), Lindsay Moore, Greg Sim, Paige Catherine Smallwood (Hamilton), and Edward Staudenmayer (Girl from the North Country).

Featuring a book by Lindsey Hope Pearlman (Roar!) and two-time Emmy winner Bruce Vilanch (Divine Madness), based on an original story by Richard J. Robin, A Sign of the Times also has choreography by JoAnn M. Hunter (School of Rock) and music direction and orchestrations by Joseph Church (The Lion King).

Set during the progressive era of Women’s Liberation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War protests, A Sign of the Times follows Cindy, a young woman from Middle America, who comes to New York City in 1965, where she finds her voice. Songs include “Downtown,” “You Don’t Own Me,” “Don’t Sleep in the Subway,” “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss),” and “The Boy From New York City,” among others.

The musical had its world premiere at Goodspeed Musical’s Norma Terris Theatre in 2016 and subsequently played at the Delaware Theatre Company in 2018.

The executive producer for A Sign of the Times is Richard J. Robin, Wells Street Productions LLC.

The post Industry Reading Set For Bruce Vilanch’s Jukebox Musical, Sign Of The Times first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Herald-Tribune
FST commissions writers to create new works
By Jay Handelman, Arts Editor
Posted May 17, 2020

Florida Studio Theatre may not be able to produce or present any new shows for a while, but it is preparing for the future by commissioning 32 national playwrights, directors, musical theater creators and sketch comedy writers to develop new work.

The theater is using some of the money it received from the Paycheck Protection Program authorized under the federal CARES Act to hire the writers and other artists as full-time staff members for a two-month period. Their work will be considered for future productions in the theater’s mainstage, cabaret, sketch comedy and children’s theater programs.

Many of the writers, including Mark St. Germain and Larry Parr, have long or recent histories with the theater.

Parr got his start as a playwright at FST with “Hi-Hat Hattie,” and went on to create “My Castle’s Rockin’,” “Ethel Waters: His Eye is on the Sparrow” and such plays as “Invasion of Privacy” and “Sundew.” St. Germain is the most produced playwright in the theater’s history with such works as “Freud’s Last Session,” “Relativity,” “Dancing Lessons,” “Best of Enemies,” “The Fabulous Lipitones” and “Becoming Dr. Ruth.”

St. Germain was already commissioned to create a one-woman play about Eleanor Roosevelt for the theater’s Suffragist Project, which is due to conclude in August. For the Playwrights Project, he will work with Associate Artist Jason Cannon on a historical drama about the real-life meeting of Frederick Douglass and John Brown before Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry before the Civil War.

Carole J. Bufford, a cabaret performer who has spent the last few summers singing in FST’s summer cabaret series, is among the creative talents hired, along with Sandy Rustin, whose play “The Cottage” was presented last summer.

Rustin, an actress and playwright, said the theater is “serving as a light during this uncertain time.”

Kenneth Jones, whose play “Alabama Story” had a run at FST in 2016, said the writing job came at a time when three productions of his play had been canceled this spring because of the coronavirus, resulting in a loss of income.

“It felt like a miracle when FST offered me the chance to work on a new script,” he said.

Kate Alexander, Associate Director at Large, will work as a literary advisor/dramaturg with Jones on a play about a family business at a crossroads in the Deep South.

Alexander also is working with Thomas Gibbons, the author of “Permanent Collection” and “Bee-luther-hatchee,” on a play about dilemmas that come with the rise of digital manipulation.

Bufford said, “Knowing that FST has brought together so many artists to create new works is equal parts thrilling and comforting. Art will always prevail. We need it to challenge our minds, to escape our reality, to delight and take joy in, to celebrate the past and to forge a new path into the future.”

Sean Daniels, artistic director of the Arizona Theatre Company, will work with the FST artistic staff to develop “Tampa,” about two brothers who take different paths in life.

Richard Hopkins, FST’s producing artistic director, said the idea for the Playwrights Project came to him just three days after the theater shut down performances in mid-March.

He said he had a revelation about Shakespeare, who instead of addressing the plagues of his time “wrote, without judgment, about the wonder of humankind, which made me think that now is the time for FST to inspire the creation of plays” and to ask playwrights to write “like Shakepeare and reveal humanity’s complexities without judgment.”

Other past FST artists in the project include playwright Sarah Bierstock, whose “Honor Killing” had its world premiere at FST; Stephan deGhelder, an actor, director and writer who has contributed material to the theater’s recurring cabaret series “Laughing Matters”; Michael McKeever, a Miami playwright and co-founder of the Zoetic Stage whose “The Miamians” and “South Beach Babylon” have been produced at FST; Sam Mossler, an actor most recently seen starring in “Kunstler” and a playwright, whose association with the theater began as a child; Jason Odell Williams, whose play “Handle with Care” was presented earlier this year; Nick Santa Maria, who has worked as an actor and writer at FST in years past; The Swingaroos, a musical ensemble led by Kimberly Hawkey and pianist Assaf Gleizner that puts a modern spin on music of the 1930s and 40s; Ben Mackel, a singer, musician who is part of musical trio The Blue Eyed Bettys; and Gabriel Barre, a Broadway and regional theater director who staged FST’s production of “The World Goes ’Round” at FST.

Among the other artists are nationally known actor, comedian and comedy writer Bruce Vilanch; Brandon Wardell, an actor, singer and producer who is part of the musical group Under the Streetlamp; Rachel Lynett, a queer Afro-Latinx playwright; Mark Kendall, a comedy writer and star of the one-person show “The Magic Negro and Other Blackness”; Jeffrey Couchman, co-author of the play “Three Wise Guys” based on Christmas stories by Damon Runyon; and Deborah Brevoort, an author of plays, musicals and opera librettos best known for “The Women of Lockerbie.”

Lynett is working on a loose adaptation of “As You Like It,” while Williams is working on “America in One Room,” described as a wide-ranging discussion about the state of the nation involving audience participation.

In addition to their creative work, the participants will be leading online workshops and tutorials for the theater’s online educational offerings.

The post Bruce Vilanch And Other Writers Have Been Hired To Create New Work At Florida Studio Theater In Sarasota first appeared on We Got Bruce!.