Jeffrey Neuman’s ‘The Headliners’ to Premiere at Cherry Creek Theater

Live in The Pluss Theatre at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center, Cherry Creek Theatre is proud to present the world premiere of The Headliners—a new play by acclaimed local playwright Jeffrey Neuman.

Fictionalizing a moment in the lives of two historical vaudeville superstars as the pair straddle their on and off stage personas, The Headliners puts female impersonator Julian Eltinge (Jeremy Rill) and flamboyant co-star Eva Tanguay (Norrell Moore) in the spotlight at the turn of the 20th century. Their latest engagement satirizes gender, respectability, and the institution of marriage.

Neuman infuses vaudeville songs and show into a surprisingly timely story that explores the explosive crossroads of gender, fame, sexuality, and power.

“I could not be more honored to be chosen by the brilliant Jeffrey Neuman to produce the full-scale, world premiere production of The Headliners,” Cherry Creek Theatre Artistic Producer Susie Snodgrass exclaims. “Little did I know exactly how timely this piece would be. Being queer is not a crime! Jeffrey combines imagery and poetry in this new piece, and I can’t wait to put it on stage.”

The Headliners runs May 5-21 on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, with an additional performance scheduled for Monday, May 15. Neuman took some time to talk more about the production and his work with OFM.

Let me begin by asking, how excited are you for The Headliners to premiere at Cherry Creek Theatre?

(Laughs) I know I’m supposed to be a wordsmith, but there’s no words that I think adequately express how excited I am. This has been a four-year development journey that kind of got waylaid with COVID, so this is literally a dream come true.

The Headliners fictionalizes a moment in the lives of two historical vaudeville superstars. How did the concept and idea for this play come to fruition?

I’m kind of a musical theater geek and I love theater history, and there’s something about vaudeville in particular that I’ve always felt this draw and pull towards. So, as a vaudeville geek, I tend to do a lot of reading and perusing vaudevillian titles, and I was reading a book about Ziegfeld, and it was kind of an overview of all the headliners and stars that appeared in his annual revues. What was interesting was at the end of the book, there was a biographical paragraph of each of the people who had ever appeared on the stage. I was going through that biographical index, and I came across the name Eva Tanguay, which I had heard, but I didn’t know much about.

The paragraph that was in there was captivating. When you can put forward an incredible and eccentric personality in just one paragraph, you know there’s something there to be plumbed. So, I started doing a little bit of research into her, and she was as fascinating as I thought she was going to be. Incredibly ahead of her time, she was kind of like the Lady Gaga of vaudeville, back when Gaga was her most Gaga. Eva pushed a lot of envelopes and limits, and I immediately got drawn to her as a character. However, there wasn’t much written about her. There was a lot of source material, newspaper articles, and things that I could read, but not a lot of academic or biographical literature.

Then luckily, a very wonderful man named Andrew Erdman wrote a book about her, and I just dove into that. I ate it up, and in two pages in the middle of the book, he mentioned a publicity stunt that she pulled with another one of her, I don’t want to say colleagues because they didn’t know one another well, but they were two of the biggest stars in the world at that time. They decided to join forces and pull a publicity stunt, and I was like, that right there is a story I can spend some time with.

How timely would you say this production is?

It’s surprisingly timely. I know it’s set in 1908 New York, but sadly, with what we’re experiencing right now with suppression of LGBTQ expression on stage and in performance, it feels incredibly timely because it deals with two people who were caught in the crossfires of societal expectations about gender roles. I think that we are still very much in those crosshairs and having those conversations.

Is there a part of the show you are most excited for audiences to see?

I’m just really excited for people to spend some time with these two characters. Even though they are highly fictionalized, and I had to create these characters from my own heart in the head, they’re based on actual historical people who were once the most renowned celebrities in the country, possibly the world. Yet, their names mean nothing to us right now. The fact that audiences will be able to share an evening with Eva and Julian, to me, that is where the thrill comes in. When I’m in the audience, I’m going to be paying attention to responses because there are some fun and shocking moments in the play.

What do you ultimately hope they take away from The Headliners?

This isn’t a reclamation project, but I do want them to know that Julian and Eva were important people to theatrical history, and I think the biggest thing is I want people to have dynamic conversations on the way home. It’s not an easy play. It’s a pretty complex play in what these people are struggling with and struggling against, individually and together, and I want people to talk about their struggles, especially as it relates to gender roles and gender fluidity. I also want that to open up the conversation about what’s going on in the here and now too. No pun intended, but I hope it engenders conversation. That’s what I’m most hopeful for.

Have you always had a passion for writing and telling queer stories?

That’s a really interesting and a very twofold question (laughs). I’ve always been passionate about writing, but I didn’t really get into writing until much later in my life. I always supported and assisted writers by trade and by training. I’m a dramaturg, so I would help new plays and playwrights in development, but I never really trusted my own voice as an artist and as a human being until about 17 years ago.

I lost my hearing to congenital hearing loss, and I started realizing how important storytelling is because as somebody who has lost a sense, that’s what you do. You piece together the world into a story until it makes sense. I’m like, oh, I can do this. Then to answer the part of your question about telling queer stories, because I am queer, I think it just kind of oozes out of me into all stories that I tell, even when it’s not necessarily about queer characters. As somebody who grew up in the shadow of AIDS, closeted, and as a queer man, it definitely informs every story that I think is important enough to tell on stage.

What are some themes or elements you always try to incorporate into your works?

Oh, that’s a great question. I think there’s kind of leitmotifs in my work, but when it comes to writing, I tend to write from two places—exorcism or wish fulfillment. I’m either trying to exorcize demons and try to figure out something about myself or about the world, or wish fulfillment, where I’m like, I don’t think this will ever happen in my life. So, I want to create it for myself dramatically.

I think because of that, I tend to gravitate towards stories about interpersonal relationships where people are struggling to come to terms with truths about themselves and figure out the best way to articulate what those truths are. I would probably say that’s the continuing thread in my work, and it’s very, very much at the heart of The Headliners.

What’s next for The Headliners after its Cherry Creek premiere?

Let’s just say from your lips to a producer’s ears! As with any piece that we create and birth for the theater, we hope that it has a really long life. I will say that world premieres are very, very hard to get, but what’s even harder to get is a second production. Once you get a second production, things then become a little bit looser with regards to how a play is used and how it lives in the world, and that’s my goal. I’m working closely with the production team to make this the strongest, most effective piece of theater, and then, hopefully, it’ll have a life somewhere else in the world.

There was a lot of interest in the piece when it was first developed in residency at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. We had to delay it because of COVID, unfortunately, and then with the rise of Black Lives Matter, programming at theaters changed a lot. The piece kind of lost some momentum, but I hope it gains that momentum back again because I think it’s a fun and important story.

Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention or plug?

I do! This is kind of like a “pinch me” year because I was dormant for so long in the aftermath of COVID, but this year, I have three world premieres all happening in Denver within seven months of one another, and they are three different plays. There’s The Headliners at Cherry Creek Theatre, and I’m writing in conjunction with the ensemble at The Catamounts, which is a Boulder-based theater company, a piece of theater that takes place on a historic property in the city of Westminster. It’s not a traditional piece.

You are going to be out in the wild, and theater is going to be happening around you and with you on a farm in Westminster. That’s based on a little slice of Colorado history, and then the last piece is going up at Benchmark Theatre in Denver in Lakewood in December. That is a really different piece for me, kind of a complete break with realism, but it’s very much my response to the Black Lives Matter Movement. George Floyd’s brother gave a very beautiful and impassioned talk to Congress, and I was so moved by his words that it was a springboard for a story that I wanted to engage and tell.

Stay up-to-date and connect with Neuman by visiting his official website, theaterbyjeff.com. For more information and to purchase tickets for The Headliners, visit cherrycreektheatre.org.  

Photos courtesy of McLeod9 Creative and Olga Lopez