DENNIS ANYONE? with Dennis Hensley

There's a new theater company that opened about a mile from Dennis's home in North Hollywood called The Wisteria Theater and it's a magical place. The show that's currently running there is  Xanadu: The Musical,  based on the iconic Olivia Newton-John movie musical that Dennis has been obsessed with since 1980. In this episode, Dennis welcomes the team behind the show to play a couple rounds of hi...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by actor-director-producer Ellen Geer who is the Producing Artistic Director of one of Dennis's favorite spots in Los Angeles, The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topange Canyon. Dennis has been going to see plays at the outdoor amphitheater since the early 90's and has seen Ellen perform in scores of shows there as well as seeing just as many that she directed and prod...

A few weeks back, Dennis was invited to moderate a Queer Authors Panel at the first-ever Pride Live Hollywood festival. The panel was so fun, interesting and, in a few instances, downright dishy, that Dennis thought it would make a great podcast. The authors featured are Nancy Beverly ( Shelby's Vacation ), Curtis Chin, ( Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant ), Jim Colucci ( Gol...

Dennis is joined via Zoom from Los Angeles by Juan Pablo Di Pace, the writer, co-director and star of the new film Before We Forget. The film is about an Argentinian film director in his 40s named Matias (played by Di Pace) who's struggling to finish a movie he's making based on his first love, 25 years ago, when he was a student at an international boarding school in Northern Italy. The movie is...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by his dance class friend and rising star, writer-director-actor Leah McKendrick to talk about her breakout comedy from last year Scrambled as well as this month's reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer , which she has a story credit on. Leah talks about how Scrambled was inspired by her own journey of freezing her eggs as single woman in her 30's, how she was able to...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by two of the men behind his favorite indie of the year so far Rent Free , co-writer and director Fernando Andrès and actor-producer Jacob Roberts. The film is about two queer, down-on-their-luck best friends Ben (Roberts) and Jordan (played by David Trevino) who hatch a plan to live rent free for a year in Austin, Texas--on friends' sofas or whatever they can fanagle--wh...

Just as we're hitting the 10th Anniversary of Federal Marriage Equality in the US, Dennis is joined via Zoom by Frankie Frankeny, the driving creative force behind the gorgeous and comprehensive new coffee table book  Love: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality. Frankie recalls how she first became passionate about the cause of marriage equality decades ago, doing entensive research for the book...

Dennis is joined via Zoom from Portugal by former U.K. boxing manager Kellie Maloney to discuss the new documentary about Kellie's life and transition  Knockout Blonde: The Kellie Maloney Story.  The film, which is now available on VOD, documents her previous life as successful boxing promoter Frank Maloney through her transition to Kellie in 2014 and its aftermath. Kellie talks about falling in l...

In this special Tonys week episode, Dennis is joined via Zoom by Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller to discuss his book Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir , which documents his journey from a childhood of family dysfunction and always feeling like an outsider to thriving as a Broadway producer with four Best Musical Tonys to his credit ( Rent, Avenue Q, In the Heights and Hamilton ). Jeffrey talks about...

Dennis is joined by his friends and past podcast guests Frank DeCaro and Jim Colucci to talk about a brand new arts festival they are co-programming. It's called  Pride Live! Hollywood and it takes place June 11th through the 29th at various venues in Hollywood. JIm and Frank talk about the various events on the agenda, including a Norman Lear tribute, a screening and party of Saturday Night Fever...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by playwright Tom Jacobson whose latest play Tasty Little Rabbit is currently showing at the Moving Arts Theatre in Los Angeles. The play tells the true story of a 1936 Fascist Italian investigation of pornography charges in Taormina, Sicily. This artistic prosecution uncovers a much darker secret of a 1890s love triangle between photographer Wilhelm Von Gloeden, an a 18...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by actor Kasey Mahaffy who is currently starring as Alfie Byrne, a Dublin bus driver who directs community theater at night, in the musical A Man of No Importance at A Noise Within theater in Pasadena. Kasey talks about relating more to this role than any he's played in the past, how he and the rest of the cast honed their Irish accents, why now is a very meaningful time...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by Director Lovell Holder & Writer-Performer Roger Q. Mason, the duo behind the provocative and beautifully-crafted new film  Lavender Men, which is based on Mason's hit stage play of the same name. The story centers on Taffeta (they/them, played by Mason), the put-upon stage manager of a play about Abraham Lincoln. After one too many backstage indignities, Tafetta cracks...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by filmmaker Sarah Kambe Holland whose new film Egghead and Twinkie flips the gay guy-straight girl trope on its head with the story of a gay girl-straight boy friendship that undergoes some changes after the girl comes out. Sarah talks about starting work on the project at 19, taking inspiration from her own coming out story, shooting a road movie within one hour of Orla...

In this special bonus episode, Dennis interviews his friend Steven Havens, who just won $250,000 as the last man standing on Season 3 of the Fox game show  The Floor . Steven talks about how he came to be on the show, the months of rigorous coaching provided by his game designer husband Jeb (who happens to be Dennis's co-creator on the game You Don't Know My Life! ), shooting the entire season ove...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by Hillary Carlip the designer and co-author of the most fabulous pop-up book you'll ever see Willis Wonderland: The Legendary House of Atomic Kitsch , which is a book dedicated to the home, kitsch collection and all-round fabulousness of Hillary's friend, the late great songwriter and visual artist Allee Willis. (Allie is also the subject of a documentary that was featur...

As a Bonus on the main Dennis Anyone, here are two back-to back sample episodes of Dennis's brand new Patreon offering: DENNIS ANYONE: THE PATREON PROJECT, which you can subscribe to for $5 by going to Patreon.com and searching Dennis Anyone.   Topics in Episode 1 include: the  Late Night With the Devil  actor Fayssal Bazzi learning that I put him on my dreamboard and his response, Four Rooms auth...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by writer for Part 2 of their conversation about Paul's new novel  What Is Wrong With You? as well as his previous novel Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, both of which offer readers sides of Rudnick they haven't seen before. In Part 2, Paul talks about the raw rage and freedom he felt while writing Farrell alone in a room during the pandemic, the lost gay Koch b...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by one of his literary heroes, author, screenwriter and playwright Paul Rudnick, to discuss Paul's new novel  What is Wrong With You?, which is about an offbeat assortment of gay and straight characters whose lives and lovelives collide at the destination wedding of a tech billionaire on the billionaire's private island. Paul talks about the stranger whose despondent blog...

Dennis connects via Zoom with Roshan Sethi, director of the new film  A Nice Indian Boy , which is about and Indian-American doctor named Naveen (Roshan's real-life boyfriend Karan Soni) who falls who falls for a photographer named Jay (Jonathan Groff), who is white but who was adopted and raised by Indian-American parents. Complications ensue when Naveen brings Jay home to meet his family. Roshan...

Dennis is joined via Zoom and telephone by writer to talk about his new book  It Seemed Like A Bad Idea At The Time: The Worst TV Shows In History And Other Things I Wrote. The book attempts to answer the question, "How did this project happen?" about such so-bad-it's-delicious shows like  The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special as well as the...

Dennis is joined via Zoom my playwright Audrey Cefaly & Actor Carolyn Messina from the play Alabaster , which is showing at the Fountain Theater in Los Angeles through March 30th. The play is a darkly Southern tale about a woman named June and her two goats who all survived an Alabama tornado and lived to tell the tale. June's sheltered world is rocked when a New York photographer named Alice come...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by author and sex worker David Wichman to talk about his new book  The Four Rooms: An Inqueery On Sexual Freedom and Well-Being . David talks about why he wanted to write the book, the struggles he faced along the way to publishing it and how, once it was finished, he delighted in having AI read it to him in the plummy British voice of actor-director Richard Attenborough....

This episode features excerpts from the February 8th performance of Dennis Hensley's The MisMatch Game at the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Renberg Theatre. The panelists are Danny Casillas as Reba Areba, Jackie Beat as Bea Arthur, Sherry Vine as Rue McClanahan, Melissa Peterman as Rena Z., Felix Pire as Antonio Banderas and Tom Lenk as Tilda Swinton. The questions cover everyone from Jonathan Bailey...

Dennis is joined via Zoom by actor-writer-composer Margot Rose to discuss her new autobiographical musical  Unconditional , which is playing at the Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles through March 9th. The play tells the story of how Margot became a mother of twins in her forties, got a divorce from her wife and then suffered an unfathomable loss in her sixties when her daughter Nora died suddenly in...