‘HIGH SCHOOL’ PLUS THIRTY
Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore in publicity shots for WRONG WINDOW, last year’s production at Brookdale Community College. (Photos by Danny Sanchez)
“You’re the first to know,” writes Billy Van Zandt in reference to High School Reunion Musical, the latest in a long and lucrative line of stage projects created by the tag team of Van Zandt and Jane Milmore.
Scheduled to make its world premiere at Brookdale Community College on May 15, the show — a comedy set at a 30-year class reunion, with a cast of 20 performers — continues the annual “homecoming” tradition established more than 20 years ago by the two Monmouth County natives. It’s a tradition that’s taken root at BCC’s Performing Arts Center, with some of the most recent debuts including Silent Laughter, A Night at the Nutcracker, You’ve Got Hate Mail and last year’s Hitchcock parody Wrong Window.
It’s a 30-year milestone as well for the two writing partners, who began their collaboration in 1979 with the perennially popular stage farce Love, Sex and the IRS. Van Zandt (who hails from Middletown) and Milmore (who calls Rumson her old stomping grounds) have gone on to create more than 20 other plays, an original screenplay (A Wake in Providence) and a career in Hollywood as writers and/or producers on such sitcoms as Newhart, Martin and Anything for Love. They even garnered an Emmy nomination for the CBS special I Love Lucy: The Very First Show.
These days the partners divide their time between the coasts, juggling their schedules around each other while making time for their respective spouses (Billy’s married to actress and author Adrienne Barbeau; Jane to Golden Girls writer-producer Richard Vaczy).
Several members of the Unofficial Van Zandt-Milmore Stock Company assembled recently at the equally unofficial company HQ known as The Pour House in Tinton Falls. Such Van Zandt-Milmore veterans as Jeff Babey, Michael Chartier, Glenn Jones and Geoff Shields have apparently signed on to the new project, on which the authors will be working with composer-conductor Nick DeGregorio.
With that cast and the comic premise — in which a gathering of “mature” middle-agers reverts back to the petty drama and cliquish heartbreak of high school — HSRM promises to be a fun time, with perhaps just a little passing wink and nod to the Disney star machine. More on this project as it comes together.
Posted
January 06, 2009
in
under
