March, 4th 2020 

Hi, all -- OSQ Gary Gunas here.

With the release today of Episode 12, our very last Old Show Queens interview, Billy and I asked our wonderful producer/directors, Andrew Hawkins and Jeff Marx, to let us post a note on their OSQ Instagram and Facebook pages.  Hopefully you're reading it now.

Billy met Jeff when he recorded Jeff's brilliant, lyric-licious AVENUE Q for RCA Victor.  I finally met him, and his super-star husband Andrew, some years later over a very late-night dinner in a flat we were renting in Paris.  A string of widely-separated dinners continued in the years following, both in the US and here in our London home, where we once chatted out in the garden from dusk til the sun rose.  We four all love the same things about Broadway -- the crazy passion of the artists who bring it all about (Jeff of course particularly included !!), and the stories of how they do it. Plus some silly name-dropping and a few snickering, name-shaming tales (which, quite rightly, Playbill didn't show you).

One day, these lovely, funny and oh-so-loving guys said "So, could we bring a film crew with us the next time we get together?"  And so was born Old Show Queens -- a title we initially chuckled at and cheerfully dismissed, thinking they were kidding.  But it stuck.  Billy loves it.  Me, I'm... fine with it.   :-))

In November of 2018, Jeff and Andrew brought an incredibly professional and well-equipped crew to the house — Spielberg's London team, apparently.  The boys were SO engaging as interviewers that we utterly forgot the cameras (all three of them! -- or four, if you account Andrew's magic little fish-eye camera).  My great regret is that the boys mostly kept their sweet faces and kind, enthusiastic voices off-camera.  They brought so much love, joy and respect into the room, I just wish we could have shared that with you in the videos, as it's further evidence of just how wonderful showfolk can be.  

This little series is more Andrew and Jeff's accomplishment than ours -- we just yammered away as we do, while THEY made us -- so we're told, anyway -- look smart and fun.  It's all in the editing, not to mention their skill in assembling micro audio-clips of our voices to formulate words we never said, to replace the occasional words that we'd mis-spoken, such as putting the wrong person into a story.  Genius!

I also thank the boys for being so patient when ill health prevented me from speaking up very much in the March 2019 taping that yielded season two.   (I think the BEATLEMANIA stuff only made the cut because the boys wanted to give me just a few more minutes of air time and I hadn't said much else that day before I had to bail on it.)  But Billy's stories are certainly the best that our family has to offer, so I was delighted to take a back seat this time around.

Billy and I also want to thank Andrew for the intensely researched photos, film clips and sound bites that supported, on Facebook and Instagram, every episode.  (I never knew until today that there was video of David James Carroll singing from GRAND HOTEL -- and with Maury Yeston at the piano, no less!  Serious tears there.)  

High praise also goes to the boys' key associate, Shon Gale, who did a great deal of the very subtle editing, all the tedious uploading, and that crazy, fun merch!  (Hopefully they made enough to cover the postage on all the free samples they sent us!  That sequin-flipping pillow, OMG!)

I hope you'll go to the boys' website and see what else they're up to. Besides creating Andrew's stunning Masquerade, they took their 360-degree camera to Burning Man and made a surreal bike ride in the desert into something you'll never ever forget:  haveasleepover.com.

And finally, our thanks to the people who watched us, who followed us, and who wrote us such lovely notes from all over the world.  It was a fun ride!

Gary & Billy