Diversionary lands new musical "Yank!" for summer production

Click to hear songs from the musical...

Diversionary production is West Coast Premiere

Diversionary Theatre will produce the new musical Yank! as the first show of its 2008-2009 season, running July 10-August 17. Yank! has book and lyrics by David Zellnik and music by Joe Zellnik. Igor Goldin will direct as well as recreate Jeffry Denman's original choreography, and San Diegan Amy Dalton will be music director. “We are very excited to welcome David, Joe and Igor to San Diego and to Diversionary,” said Dan Kirsch, Diversionary’s Executive & Artistic Director. “We are very honored that the New York creative team has chosen Diversionary for their first full regional production.” Yank! will be an official event of San Diego LGBT Pride (July 19-20).

Yank! is a love song to Hollywood's "it takes one of every kind" platoon flicks and to 1940s Broadway. Yank! tells the story of a war reporter named Stu and an army private named Mitch who fall in love and struggle to survive in a time and place where the odds are stacked against them. Suffused with period songs (swing, big band, boogie-woogie), it explores what stories get told in wartime, and how WWII became the great catalyst in bringing gay men and women together.

Diversionary's cast will feature Amy Biedel, Zachary Bryant, Jacob Caltrider, Rocky DeHaro, Eric Dowdy, Tom Doyle, Juston Harlin, Tony Houck, Trevor Peringer, Sven Salumaa, John Whitley and Tom Zohar.

The Zellnik brothers and Goldin have just completed two developmental readings of Yank! in New York, hosted by The York Theatre Company, preparing for a possible Off-Broadway production in 2008-2009. Yank! was performed at Brooklyn’s The Gallery Players last fall, the first new book musical that theatre had produced in a generation, garnering enthusiastic reviews, sold out crowds and the production was recently nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. Previously, the show was at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2005 where it had a completely sold out run and won an audience award for Best Musical. Both productions were directed by Goldin, who also will recreate Jeffry Denman’s original choreography from the Brooklyn production at Diversionary. Diversionary will present the West Coast premiere. Diversionary is pleased to present Yank! in association with The Gallery Players, sharing costumes created by Tricia Barsamian for the Brooklyn production as well as properties and other materials.

Yank! gets it title from Yank Magazine, which grew to become the most widely read and most popular magazine in the history of the U.S. Army. By the end of World War II, twenty-three various editions of Yank Magazine had been published. At the height of the magazine's operations, there were printing presses in Honolulu, Cairo, Tokyo, Okinawa, Rome, Trinidad, Saipan and other places, and the weekly achieved a worldwide circulation of 2,600,000. It is thought to have been read by ten million. The magazine, which was staffed entirely by enlisted soldiers, printed its last issue in December 1945, realizing for the War Department a profit of $1,000,000.

“While all the characters in Yank! are fictional, all of the situations and viewpoints come directly from memoirs and oral histories of gay (and straight) service members who took part in WWII,” said playwright David Zellnik. David spent hundreds of hours combing archives, researching these "hidden" histories, even having letters sent to him from around the country from old veterans or their families. Now as this generation begins to slip irrevocably into history, the Yank! team remains dedicated to the hope that their experiences will not be forgotten. Other inspirations came from Allan Berube's Coming Out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two; interviews by Studs Terkel for The Good War; and Evan Bachner’s Men of WW II: Fighting Men at Ease. Song clips, production history and more can be found at www.yankthemusical.com.

A review on TheaterMania of The Gallery Players production said, “The Zellnik brothers have crafted an old-fashioned musical with a contemporary, socially conscious sensibility. The terrific score manages the difficult feat of invoking the musical styles of the era without sounding completely derivative. The haunting "Remembering You" could easily have gotten radio play in the 1940s, and the tuner pays tribute to the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and other tunesmiths.”

Diversionary Theatre was started in 1986. The mission of the theatre is to produce plays with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes that portray characters in their complexity and diversity both historically and contemporarily.

Yank! will preview on July 10 and 11, and open on Saturday, July 12 and run through Sunday, August 17. Performance times are: Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday & Saturday at 8:00pm, Sunday at 2:00 & 7:00pm, and a Monday, July 28 performance at 7:30pm. Single tickets are now on sale. For information, call the Diversionary box office at 619.220.0097 or log on to www.diversionary.org.

The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture provides major support for Diversionary Theatre.

Reviews for Yank!

The old-fashioned musical is neither dying nor in need of saving…if you love Golden Age-style musical romances, you can still find them - if you know where to look. Right now, that place is Brooklyn, where The Gallery Players…. [Yank! is] a touching and oh-so-tuneful look at a side of World War II we seldom see…”
- TalkinBroadway.com

“An old-fashioned musical with a contemporary, socially conscious sensibility.” - TheaterMania

“Yank! overlays a modern gay sensibility on a typical wartime crew to illustrate the sheer hell, internal and external, gay soldiers endured….More-complex emotions than many musicals allow are present.” - Back Stage

“If you’re looking for a well-crafted, gay-positive musical that’s sexy and heartfelt, you’ll have to look long and far to find anything as terrific as Yank!” - NEXT Magazine

“Yank! is one of the most heartening theatrical experiences in years….The choreography of thisshow is brilliant….The show never apologizes for its honesty…at the end of Yank! the audience (including me) was on its feet.” - The Brooklyn Paper

“Yank! is moving, heartbreaking, funny, lyrical, endearing, and painful….” - Q Onstage

“Joseph and David Zellnik serve up a beautifully composed, entertaining slice of our secret history. But because they tell this coming out story with such rich historical and psychological detail, Yank! engages fundamental questions of love, citizenship and cultural belonging, beyond the obvious audience of lesbians and gay men….Yank! is poised to become a musical of real stature.” - nytheatre.com

David and Joe Zellnik have collaborated on the musicals First in Flight: The Wright Brothers for TheaterworksUSA, which toured the country to raves in 2004-05, and City of Dreams, which was performed at the first International Music Theatre Festival (Cardiff, Wales 2002), the Midtown International Theatre Festival (New York, 2002), and which won the National Music Theatre Network competition in 2003. Two songs from City of Dreams appear on Alison Fraser's album Men In My Life.

David Zellnik is the author of numerous plays, most recently Serendib (Ensemble Studio Theatre, 2007) and Ariel Sharon Hovers Between Life and Death and Dreams of Theodor Herzl (Theatre J, Washington DC 2007). Previous plays include Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom (2001 OOBR award, AllOutArtsBest Play 2000, and currently optioned for film by Rob Ahrens of Xanadu) and Killing Hand (EST Marathon, 1998). He is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre and was a founding member of Youngblood.

In addition to composing, Joe Zellnik has collaborated with his sister on the historical mysteries Murder at the Portland Variety and A Death at the Rose Paperworks (both from Midnight Ink). He is currently at work on his first solo novelistic effort.

Igor Goldin has directed David and Joseph Zellnik's Yank!, The Chocolate Tree (National Alliance for Musical Theatre, New World Stages with Cady Huffman and Christopher Sieber), Unlock’d (NYMF 2007 Best In Fest Award; Outstanding New Musical 2007 - Talkin' Broadway Summer Theatre Festival Citation), the all-star concert My First Time (New World Stages), Common Grounds (NYMF 2006 Award for Excellence in Direction), Yank! (NYMF 2005 - Outstanding New Musical 2005 - Talkin' Broadway; NYMF Audience Award - 1st runner up), and many others including Violet, The Spitfire Grill, The Full Monty and The Complete History of America (abridged). Igor is an on-going director of musical theatre industry showcases at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.