Playwright and Performer Sandy Rustin is Living Her Dream, On and Off Stage

East coast playwright and performer Sandy Rustin is getting ready for a very exciting weekend. She is returning to her hometown of Chicago to see her massively popular theatrical adaptation of the movie Clue, which has had more than 3,000 productions to date. And a bit further north in Milwaukee, she’s attending the opening night of Skylight Music Theatre’s A Jolly Holiday: Celebrating Disney’s Broadway Hits, a seasonal musical revue that she also penned. It is literally a dream come true for a woman who knew as a young girl that she wanted a career in the theater, as both a writer and a performer, preferably making people laugh.

“I grew up with a really funny dad,” Rustin reminisced in a recent phone interview. “While other families listened to music in the car, we played comedy albums on repeat. So for me, performing and comedy were very natural outlets for my creativity.” After attending improv classes at the Piven Theater Workshop in Evanston as a teen, Rustin began writing sketch comedy musicals for her high school. As a theater major at Northwestern, she continued creating original sketch comedy, blending her passions for music, humor and performance. 

Then, like a lot of ambitious actors, after graduation she headed to New York City, where this versatility served Rustin very well. Over the past three decades it has allowed her to find work singing in musicals, performing in straight plays and even doing improv with Amy Poehler’s Upright Citizens’ Brigade. During this time she has also collaborated with teams of writers and composers on Broadway-bound adaptations, and pursued her own playwriting, while maintaining a “day job” narrating hundreds of audio books. 

Rustin wrote the book and lyrics for “American Girl Live,” which toured across the country. Photo by Amy Boyle.

“After I had kids I realized that doing eight shows a week wasn’t possible anymore,” Rustin admitted, “and that’s when I really started to find my voice as a writer.” While her original musical Rated P for Parenthood ran Off-Broadway in 2012, her latest successes have been joint endeavors adapting existing material for the stage. In the musical American Girl Live, she brought the messages behind a beloved doll collection to life as a stage show, featuring the adventures and friendships of plucky tween girls. The production enjoyed a 46-city national tour in 2019.

A production of “Clue” at Paper Mill Playhouse earlier this year.

Rustin also wrote the book for Mystic Pizza, a jukebox musical adaption of the classic 1988 film, with a soundtrack full of pop hits of the era, including “Take My Breath Away,” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and “Manic Monday.” But the project that landed her on American Theatre magazine’s list of most-produced playwrights of the 2022-2023 season is the stage version of Clue; a play based on a movie, which is based on the murder mystery board game that everyone loved playing as a kid. 

“Adaptations are like puzzles,” Rustin explained. “You’re finding the beats, the important moments, and the emotional arcs of the original material and then putting those pieces together for the stage. And when it’s a well known property, you also have to consider what content the fans will absolutely want to see.”

She continued, “With an original show you start with a blank page. With an adaptation, you start with a set of characters and central plot points already in front of you. But the principles of playwriting remain the same. Adaptations just give you a headstart on the writing process.”

Rehearsal photo of “Jolly Holiday: Celebrating Disney’s Broadway Hits” at Skylight Music Theatre. Photo by Mark Frohna.

A Jolly Holiday: Celebrating Disney’s Broadway Hits is a new kind of adaptation for Rustin, since it’s built around 33 songs from 13 of Disney’s biggest Broadway shows, but did not come with a unifying story. “The show was originally envisioned as a concert that highlighted a lot of the Disney catalog,” Rustin explained. “As it gradually evolved into a character-driven revue, the artistic team felt that a stronger narrative would be useful.” At this point her friend and longtime collaborator, director Casey Hushion said, “You know, we could really use a writer.” That’s when she joined the team.

According to Rustin, although the project was exciting, it was also a bit daunting, since in all of Disney’s tuneful classics, there is not one song specifically about the holidays. “Structuring it around a holiday party was discussed, and when I came onboard I sank my teeth into that. The premise morphed into friends who are decorating a Christmas tree, and with each song they sing an ornament is added. We curated all the songs, deciding which ones we wanted to use, and in what order. Then the challenge was figuring out how to make this evening feel organic.”

The answer to that question was focusing on what Disney does best: making memories that last a lifetime. “Everybody has a Disney memory,” Rustin said. “Whether it’s from the books, movies, songs or cartoons, there’s so many ways that generations of children have connected to Disney stories. So that’s how we ended up with a group of friends sharing holiday memories connected to Disney music.” When asked about working with some extremely well known songs, Rustin replied, “In this case our job was to make sure that the tone and style of every song fit into the narrative and they were gelling with the book.”

Photo by Mark Frohna.

After a successful world premiere at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse last season, Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theatre is presenting the Midwest premiere of A Jolly Holiday: Celebrating Disney’s Broadway Hits, November 18 - December 31 in the Cabot Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center. Audiences will be treated to favorite tunes such as “Be Our Guest” (Beauty and the Beast), “Under the Sea” (The Little Mermaid), “Santa Fe” (Newsies), “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” (Mary Poppins), “Circle of Life” (The Lion King), “Bare Necessities” (The Jungle Book), “Let it Go” (Frozen) and more from shows like Aladdin, High School Musical, Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Elton John & Tim Rice’s Aida, among others. The production, directed by Skylight Artistic Director Michael Unger, features Daryn Alexus, Joey Chelius, Shawn Holmes, Kevin James Sievert, and Samantha Sostarich in the cast.

Rustin is excited to see this version, since it includes a new element – a chorus of six young performers in two rotating casts. The addition was suggested by Unger, who has worked with Rustin on previous productions on the East coast. “It makes sense,” she said. “I think Michael is such a talented director and he loves working with kids. In many ways that ongoing collaboration is the most exciting part – sharing an idea with someone you admire and then seeing where the production goes next.”