Un-Freakin-Believable! A Decades-Old Soap Is Getting a New Lease on Life
You can’t “tune in tomorrow” for this soap, only on Tuesday, July 16. That’s when the curtain goes up on a live reading of Beverly Hills, a never-produced daytime drama written by our sister site TVLine’s founder Michael Ausiello — when he was 13 years old!
Back then, the show wasn’t intended to be a comedy. But now, it is most definitely a laughing matter. Not only does the cast include actors as notoriously funny as Veep “bag man” Tony Hale, Psych star Dulé Hill, Brooklyn Nine-Nine MVP Melissa Fumero and Community grads Gillian Jacobs and Jim Rash, but they won’t get to read so much as a word of the script until the moment that they take the stage.
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Insane, no? It’s a recipe for hilarious chaos, which you can watch unfold Tuesday night via livestream. (Proceeds from the purchase of $15 virtual tickets will benefit The Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide-prevention organization that offers support to the LGBTQ+ community. To order, click here.)
“Back in the ’80s,” reads the official press release, “when Ausiello was a closeted gay pubescent living in small-town New Jersey, he penned 517 episodes of a daytime soap opera, titled Beverly Hills. Miraculously, he saved every handwritten script. The event on July 16, which has a roughly 80-minute running time, will center on a concentrated, self-contained story arc that found six of Beverly Hills’ most popular characters traveling overseas for a life-or-death adventure.
“Although some of Teenage Ausiello’s atrocious spelling has been cleaned up for this theatrical experience, the scenes will be performed exactly as they were written all those years ago. For better or worse.”
Two members of the cast have actual soap-opera experience. Fumero was, of course, One Life to Live’s Adriana “Bitchy Bangs” Cramer from 2004-11. And Caitlin Reilly — whose father John played rascally Sean Donely on General Hospital from 1984-95 — guest-starred as his character’s daughter Annie in the 2021 episode that paid tribute to the alum and his Port Charles counterpart. (That’s her below with some extremely familiar faces.)
Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Ausiello since the late 1990s when we helped put Soaps in Depth on the map. But I didn’t write this article to score brownie points with my TVLine colleague, I did it because I know how funny he is today and can only imagine how funny he was at 13… whether or not he intended to be.
Check out the below photo gallery of the all-time greatest primetime soaps.
