By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Last Updated: 11:44 PM, August 7, 2013
Posted: 10:25 PM, August 7, 2013

It’s hard to believe there isn’t a metaphor lying around under “Rubble” — a comedy about a TV writer stuck in a pile of debris after an LA earthquake. After all, it’s by TV writer Mike Reiss and stars TV writer Bruce Vilanch.

But Reiss — a longtime mainstay on “The Simpsons” and the creator of “The Critic” and “Queer Duck” — denies any hint of an agenda.

“I just wanted to write about someone trapped in rubble,” he says. “I don’t want people to think it’s autobiography. Even for New York theater, that would be self-indulgent. It’s not my life — it’s my worst nightmare.”

As for Vilanch, the show’s star, he seems less startled by the subject than by being in the New York International Fringe Festival, where the show premieres Saturday.

“I didn’t realize how exotic the Fringe is,” says Vilanch, who’s as famous for his red glasses as he is for writing gags for the Oscars. “First of all, you learn 7,000 pages of dialogue for five performances spread over three weeks. This is like doing ‘Rigoletto’! It’s insane! And you have half the rehearsal time because everybody is working in between their other stuff.”

Reiss was moonlighting, too. First there’s “The Simpsons”: He’s been there on and off — more on than off — since Day 1, when he was a staff writer. He became showrunner for Seasons 3 and 4, which is when the series truly gelled around such classic episodes as “A Streetcar Named Marge” and “Krusty Gets Canceled.”

Lately, though, the 53-year-old’s been scaling back.

“I go to Los Angeles on Wednesday to work on ‘The Simpsons,’ and I fly the red-eye back on Thursday,” says Reiss, who lives in Midtown. “A great week is a week where I spend less than 24 hours in LA.”

And then there’s his career as a prolific kid-lit author — a line of work that somehow led to his stage career.

A few years ago, Reiss, married and childless, was lecturing about his books at the University of Connecticut when someone suggested he write a play about Connecticut, “because it hadn’t been done before.”

So he did.

“It was so easy because it was untouched territory,” says Reiss, who grew up there. “I talked about the state and its personality. And its lack of personality.”

“I’m Connecticut” received positive reviews. Emboldened, Reiss wrote “Rubble” and sent it out to a whole bunch of people.

Then, he waited.

“Nobody said ‘I hate it,’ ” he reveals. “They just didn’t respond at all. Except this one guy named James Valletti, who’s a friend of a friend of my brother-in-law’s dentist. I sent it to him, that’s how desperate I was. But he loved the play and made it his life mission to stage it.”

Not only did Valletti get the show into the Fringe, he also roped in Vilanch, a choice Reiss happilyendorsed.

“I thought we’d get a free rewrite out of him but he hasn’t changed the lines!” Reiss says. “Yet he finds all this comedy where there was no comedy. He reminds me of Jackie Gleason — he’s so physically funny, with that giant expressive face.”

Vilanch, 64, is no stranger to acting. He performed in the off-Broadway solo “Bruce Vilanch: Almost Famous” and played Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” on the road and on Broadway. Even that didn’t quite prepare him for the specific challenge of “Rubble.”

“Bette Midler sat there for 90 minutes in her Broadway show, but I told her that she at least had a couch and pillows to fluff,” he notes. “I sit, too, but surrounded by heaps of boxes. I kind of resemble a barge floating to Staten Island.”

“Rubble” opens Saturday at the Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal St., with performances through Aug. 25. Information and tickets at 866-468-7619.

The post Inside The “Rubble” first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

New York Post
Fringe in low places
By BARBARA HOFFMAN
August 12, 2010

How does a drama about the massacre in Mumbai and “Hip Hop High: The Musical” sell out without ad campaigns or a single premiere?

When they play the Fringe, folks.

The 14th annual New York International Fringe Festival kicks off tomorrow with 197 shows — a few of which have already commanded enough word-of-mouth to make them instant hits.

“Itâ€s the only show from India this year, and they reached out to the Indian community, which really responded,” says Fringe artistic director Elana K. Holy of that hot ticket, “A Personal War: Stories of the Mumbai Terror Attacks.”

As far as “Hip Hop High” is concerned, she credits its cast of energetic teenagers, “tweeting and Facebooking,” with getting the word out.

With tweets or without, thereâ€s always the hope of another “Urinetown,” the only Fringe show so far to make it all the way to Broadway.

This yearâ€s fest, running through Aug. 29, offers the usual: a sprinkling of Shakespeare (a streamlined “As You Like It,” the teen-friendly “Hamlettes”); oodles of camp (“Friends of Dorothy: An Oz Cabaret”) and titles that might have come from Max Bialystock himself — take “Jew Wish” and “Invader? I Hardly Know Her!” Please.

New this year: posh digs for Fringe Central, where you can buy tix and see trailers (1 E. Eighth St., off Fifth Avenue, across the street from Otto), plus a show-finding app you can download for free from iTunes.

With $15 tickets and all the free A/C you can soak up, itâ€s worth a gamble. Here are a few of the more promising contenders:

* Bruce Vilanch, whoâ€s written for the Oscars, the Tonys and the Emmys, is no quitter. Heâ€s retooled his 1978 flop musical “Platinum,” about a comeback-hungry Hollywood climber named Lila Halliday, and cast it with Broadway stalwarts Liz Larsen (“Hairspray”) and Sarah Litzsinger (“Beauty and the Beast”).

* A real Hollywood cutieâ€s the centerpiece of “Just in Time: The Judy Holliday Story.” Billed as “a fast-paced romp through the life of the Original Dumb Blonde,” itâ€s full of songs and the starry crew Holliday hung with: Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Durante among them.

* Ah, Michelle Dessler: “24” diehards still mourn her passing. So itâ€s nice to discover the woman who played her, Reiko Aylesworth, in “Lost and Found,” one of the festâ€s few dramas, this one about a copâ€s dysfunctional family. Another familiar face: Geraldine Librandi, who played Patty Leotardo in “The Sopranos.”

* Cinephiles should turn out in force for “Burning in China,” directed as it is by Caleb Deschanel, the cinematographer better known these days as the dad of Zooey and Emily Deschanel. Gary Mooreâ€s show is about an American professor in China who follows his students into that pre-Twitter showdown at Tiananmen Square.

Can the Fringe be serious? This year, it just might.

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The post I Got ‘Fringe’ In Low Places first appeared on We Got Bruce!.