New Musical About the Life of Heidi Fleiss is in The Works

Award-winning director Will Nunziata (Miss Peggy Lee, Over Here!, Carnegie Hall) and award-winning composer, lyricist, and librettist Billy Recce (A Musical About Star Wars, Balloon Boy) are at work on a stage musical about the infamous 1990s pop culture icon Heidi Fleiss, entitled Little Black Book.

Little Black Book is a musical/rock concert hybrid as sung by Heidi Fleiss and her pet macaws. Once a 26-year-old Hollywood Madam in the early '90s, Heidi now resides in the middle of the deserts of Nevada with 40 parrots (played by three backup singers). Backed by an all-female rock band, we join Heidi as she muses on how she's been done wrong by powerful and manipulative men in an industry based on the exploitation of women, and clamors to tell her side of a story distorted by the media. Little Black Book is a sharp-tongued, raucous, and ultimately moving 90-minute ride, examining a woman who flew too close to the sun and the society that caged her for it.

Heidi Fleiss was briefly one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. The Hollywood Madam grabbed headlines in the early '90s after she was scandalously arrested in 1993, rocking Los Angeles and the tabloids. The musical is aiming for New York City and London runs in Fall 2021. No casting has been announced yet.

Little Black Book has tapped Rachel Bertone (IRNE Award winner, Boston's Carousel, Cabaret, In the Heights) as choreographer, and Emily White (The Public Theater, FEAST Performance Series, Lyric Stage Company, Wheelock Family Theatre) as dramaturg. The show is being written by Recce and is co-conceived by Nunziata, who is also slated to direct. Both are repped by Paradigm Talent Agency.

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