New2NY: Platinum Dreams

The York Theatre Company's New2NY series offers spare stagings of original musicals. This year's spring lineup begins with Platinum Dreams, the latest effort to rescue the flop 1978 musical Platinum, which originally starred Alexis Smith as a 1940s movie-musical star striving to make a comeback in the 1970s. The score by composer Gary William Friedman and lyrics by Will Holt—who previously collaborated on The Me Nobody Knows—remains, but the books that Holt wrote with Bruce Vilanch for the Broadway production and by himself for a previous revision, Sunset, have been replaced with a new one by Friedman's wife, the singer-songwriter Stevie Holland (who also contributes new lyrics). The York's acting artistic director, Joseph Hayward, directs; Holland plays the central role, flanked by Conor Ryan (Desperate Measures) and Jovan E’Sean (Cats: The Jellicle Ball) as two younger men in the music industry.