Last Saturday evening, the sparkling Shelly Goldstein and I attended a benefit for the Alcott Center for Mental Health Services and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. It was the second and final of two performances and I wish there were many more so you all could see "An all-star reading of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls."
Valley of the Dolls was the best-selling book of 1966 and it was turned into a pretty popular movie in 1967. The film starred Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Paul Burke and Sharon Tate, and the screenplay is quite wonderful when you recast it for a live reading with, for example, Alec Mapa in the role Ms. Parkins played. They are, as you can see below, pretty much the same type…
And they had Wilson Cruz in the Patty Duke role and Bruce Vilanch playing the role Sharon Tate played, with other parts filled by Steve Bluestein, Mo Gaffney, Robert Cant, Tom Lenk, Greg Louganis (yes, the diver), Sheryl Lee Ralph (she played the character Susan Hayward played in the film), Gordon Thomson, Joan Van Ark and Marissa Jaret Winokur, with Laraine Newman as the Narrator.
Sometimes, men played women. Sometimes, women played men. Sometimes, the genders matched up. All the time, it was hilarious. The production was produced by Jon Imparato and Steve Tyler, and directed by Richard Hochberg. (By the way, the original screenplay for the movie was by Dorothy Kingsley.)
How hilarious this all was is hard to describe except to say that everyone in the Renberg Theater in Hollywood laughed from start to finish. Some of that was due to the performers expertly camping it up but a lot of it was that many of the lines and situations in the film haven't aged well. Even read the way they were supposed to be read, they were quite ridiculous.
There was a reception before the show and a reception afterwards and it all made for an enormously fun evening. I'll try and let you know if they ever do it again. If they do and you go, you might just see Shelly and me there in the audience again. Bruce Vilanch as a slinky supermodel was worth the price of admission alone.