Josh Ellis: Publicist takes stage in NYC

Former La Jolla Playhouse 

publicist takes stage in NYC

Josh Ellis in "Call My Publicist!" — Chris Johnson

Tonight in New York, a onetime behind-the-scenes player in San Diego theater (and on Broadway before that) steps into the spotlight with his own show. And it's a piece that saw its earliest incarnation here in town.

Josh Ellis, who was publicity director at La Jolla Playhouse for about a decade before leaving in 2004, is performing a one-night encore engagement of "Call My Publicist! The Starry Education of a Broadway Press Agent."

The solo show, which Ellis wrote and Gretchen Cryer is directing, is being staged by the York Theatre Co. at St. Peter's in midtown Manhattan. (The 7:30 p.m. reading is open to the public, with a suggested donation of $5, in case you happen to be in NYC this evening.)

The York hosted a well-received reading of the piece earlier this year. But "Call My Publicist!" actually got its start about six years ago with a reading at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town, which has its own play-development program.

Actually, the show's origins go back even further than that, to when Ellis, now an ordained minister in New York, was still living in San Diego and had begun contemplating writing a book about his 20-year career as a top Broadway press agent.

Early on, though, "it became pretty clear that I enjoyed telling the stories verbally more than I enjoyed writing them," Ellis said in an interview shortly after the initial York reading last spring.

Putting those stories onstage also gave Ellis a chance to impersonate the people he was writing about, including such legends as Carol Channing and Yul Brynner. (Ellis says his friend Sandy Duncan is also a big part of the show.)

Ellis acknowledges that being in the spotlight was "one of those secret desires that I've had since I was a kid. I didn't 't want to be a working actor, I wanted to be a Broadway star. It was a totally childlike idea of what it was to be a star.

"Now, though, I know being a Broadway star is not just the stardom part."

In fact, after helping shepherd some of the biggest names (and shows) on Broadway for two decades (and big productions in La Jolla after that), he has lately been teaching a class on "How to Be a Star." It helps actors develop and hone "what's in your tool kit to be a working actor besides your acting skills."

For Ellis, moving to San Diego in the 1990s represented a huge (and welcome) change of life and career.

He had been through "a pretty bruising 1980s," losing hundreds of friends to AIDS and working in a sometimes bitterly competitive business.

"I felt that when I arrived in San Diego I was the walking wounded," Ellis says.

He also had seen how much of the most exciting new-play work in the country was being done at regional theaters such as the Playhouse, rather than on Broadway, and he wanted to be a part of that.

His time in La Jolla coincided with the launch of several Broadway-bound shows, plus the now almost-fabled rise to stardom of Sutton Foster, the then-understudy who took over the lead in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" after the original actress took ill, and soon became a Broadway sensation.

Not long after 9/11, though, Ellis said he heard "a little voice in my head," telling him to "come back to New York for healing. I had no idea what that meant at all, but the message was so strong I couldn't possibly ignore it."

After moving back to New York and becoming ordained, he asked to be part of the region's chaplaincy services.

"We work hand in hand with the Red Cross at disasters," Ellis says. "(It's) an amazing feeling to be there when they needed someone" in the aftermath of such traumas as Hurricane Sandy.

Ellis, who is an interfaith minister, also officiates at weddings. And about four years ago he persuaded Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist behind "Fiddler on the Roof," to write new words for the "Fiddler" song "Sunrise, Sunset" specifically for same-sex weddings.

The song, long a popular wedding number, now has versions for both gay men and lesbians.

As for the future of his new play?

"I'd love to do it in a theater in San Diego if someone would invite me to do it," Ellis says. "I think theater audiences will like it.

"It would be great to do it in San Diego because it started there."