Almost Famous.Writer Bruce Vilanch Bruce Vilanch (born November 23, 1947) is an American comedy writer who caught the public eye when he became a wisecracking regular on the revamped Hollywood Squares with Whoopi Goldberg. Vilanch was born into a Jewish family and is a practicing Jew. takes center stage with a hilarious one-man show Almost Famous * Conceived and performed by Bruce Vilanch * Directed by Scott Wittman Scott Wittman is an American director, lyricist, and writer for Broadway, concerts, and television. He received Tony, Grammy, and Drama Desk Awards for co-writing the lyrics for the Broadway musical Hairspray, while the music was written by his life partner Marc Shaiman. * Westbeth Theatre Center, New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. (through June 10) You've laughed at Bruce Vilanch's jokes whether you know it or not. Besides being a columnist for this magazine, he's head writer on Hollywood Squares For the musical group of the same name, see . The Hollywood Squares is an American television comedy and game show in which two contestants play tic-tac-toe to win money and prizes. , and he's cowritten the Oscars show for the past ten years. Not only that, he turned Bette Midler on to Sophie Tucker! Almost Famous is a rare, almost anthropological opportunity to experience one of today's busiest comic minds live onstage. Although he spends two hours posed in front of a backdrop of tiny multicolor T-shirts ("Michael Jackson's laundry"), Vilanch isn't exactly a standup stand·up or stand-up adj. 1. Standing erect; upright: a standup collar. 2. Taken, done, or used while standing: a standup supper; a standup bar. comic. What he performs is gay oral history, with one foot in the Catskills and the other in P-town. He describes the scanty attire of leather bears as "floor-length tefillin." And he insists that the first gay men's chorus consisted of West Hollywood residents watching Raquel Welch on the Oscars and exclaiming in unison, "Oh, my God, what has she done to her hair?" Along with anecdotes about Midler, Whoopi Goldberg, and Billy Crystal, he drops names like Paul Lynde and Tallulah Bankhead that may send the MP3 generation to their search engines for further explication ex·pli·cate tr.v. ex·pli·cat·ed, ex·pli·cat·ing, ex·pli·cates To make clear the meaning of; explain. See Synonyms at explain. [Latin explic . Naughty and sweet at the same time, Vilanch locates the political message in his own autobiography: Come out to everyone you know. "That way," he says, "they'll know you're a human being like themselves, only with a heightened fashion sense." To find out more about Bruce Vilanch and related Internet sites, visit www.advocate.com Shewey is the editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion