Joshua Ravetch

Joshua Ravetch is an American playwright, screenwriter and stage director born in Los Angeles, California, who co-created and directed Carrie Fisher's one-woman show Wishful Drinking, which had a successful run on Broadway. He also co-wrote and directed Dick Van Dyke in his first-ever one-man show Step in Time! A Musical Memoir, which premiered at the Geffen Playhouse.

Career

Ravetch's award-winning play Chasing Mem'ries: A Different Kind of Musical received the Edgerton New Play Award and was nominated for the Ovation. The play starred Tony Award Winner, Tyne Daly and Academy Award, nominated Robert Forster. It world premiered at the Geffen Playhouse in 2017. Ravetch collaborated with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman with music by Marvin Hamlisch, Michel Legrand and Johnny Mandel. It is the first of three plays in the Chasing Mem'ries cycle. The second received a workshop production in 2020.

In 2024 Ravetch collaborated with Harvard Astrophysicist, Dr. Avi Loeb, on the first workshop of a play about space, time, the possibility of life on other planets, and the bizarre interstellar object, 'Oumuamua that was the first object to have ever been found traveling through our solar system from interstellar space. Loeb pointed out that it behaved in ways that were not consistent with known physics involving its shape and acceleration away from the sun. Ultimately the play addresses this moment as the most remarkable telescopes are going on line, from the JWST to the Nancy Grace Roman which launched successfully on August 30, 2026 to the Vera Rubin.

In 2020, Ravetch's play One November Yankee began its life at the NoHo Arts Theatre in a workshop production starring Academy nominated, Robert Forster and M*A*S*H's own Hot Lips Houlihan, Loretta Swit . The play moved Off-Broadway to 59E59 just as Covid hit, starring Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers. The play won the ten play competition at The Delaware Theater Company. The play was unusual in that the set was an actual full-sized crashed Piper J3 Cub. It becomes a character in the play. One review called the play,"Magnificent theatrical origami."

Ravetch also wrote and directed a workshop production of The Astronomer that was performed at The Pasadena Playhouse with Academy Award winner Shirley Jones in the title role (after an initial reading at the NoHo Arts Center Theatre). The play takes place entirely at the top of a mountain in an obseervatory dome with the telescope slashing across the stage. The play came on the heels of the whimsical project Ravetch co-wrote with stage and screen icon Dick Van Dyke, Step in Time! A Musical Memoir. Ravetch directed the world premiere production at the Geffen Playhouse, with Van Dyke starring and actually danced "Me 'Ole Bamboo" from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Ravetch is perhaps best known for having collaborated with actress/writer Carrie Fisher, and co-creating and directing her in Wishful Drinking, Fisher's one-woman-show at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse. The show enjoyed an extended run on Broadway at Studio 54 and was adapted into a special for HBO. The pair were working on the sequel, Wishful Drinking Strikes Back at the time of her passing.

Also at the Geffen Playhouse, Ravetch wrote and directed a workshop production of Writer's Cramp with Oscar nominee Robert Forster, Emmy winner and Tony nominee Holland Taylor, and Tony nominee Douglas Sills. Other writing credits include Periscope Up a play in one act that was performed at the NoHo Arts Theatre and was directed by Star Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes.

In 2023, Ravetch's play Our American Sons was workshopped at the Delaware Theatre Company. It was a project conceived during the Covid pandemic, tracking the true-life stories of gay and trans kids who have been put through the utterly damaging and traumatic atrocity known as conversion therapy, a practice slowly being outlawed throughout the USA.

Ravetch also co-wrote and directed Beverly Johnson: IN VOGUE, which workshopped in Palm Springs in 2023 and opened Off-Broadway in January 2024. That date coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the famous ground-breaking Vogue cover where Beverly Johnson became the first ever black woman to grace the cover of American Vogue. She was nominated for the Adelco.

In 2021, Ravetch and Hamlin joined forces again in his one man show, Icarus, the Sun and the Limelight revealing the unlikely journey of an actor who loved Shakespeare, through his long running role on L.A. Law, to relationships and marriages to Ursula Andres, Nicolette Sheridan and Lisa Rinna. The most unexpected revelation is that Hamlin started a fusion energy company (TAE) that is one of the leading private companies on the way to clean, renewable, cheap energy. The company that Hamlin started while being featured as People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive is valued at more than 6 billion dollars.

In 2018, Ice Skating legend, Dorothy Hamill, joined pair skaters, Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner in a tour of "Go Figure: The Randy Gardner Story". Ravetch co-wrote and directed the play that followed the trio in extraordinary experiences in the world of the winter Olympics at a time when Russia and the U.S. were very public Olympic rivals. The three tell their own stories as we discover that Dorothy Hamill's mother missed her Gold Medal Performance to watch a soap opera back at the Olympic village and Randy passed a note from Oleg Protopopov under the noses of the watchful eyes of the KGB to Dick Button who staged a competition to allow the Protopopov's to defect.

In 2015, Ravetch adapted long distance swimmer, Diana Nyad in the play, "Onward: The Diana Nyad Story." The play began it's rum in North Hollywood, CA before moving to Key West Florida where it played at the Studios of Key West, just a mile from where Nyad made landfall after her historic 111 hour swim from Cuba to Florida.

Ravetch's other playwriting credits include his first play Girders, which he also directed and which enjoyed an extended run at Los Angeles' Coast Playhouse, first starring Robert Forster and then George Murdock, produced by Evan Greene. It was optioned by Barbara Broccoli (James Bond) and her husband Fred Zollo. Based on the famous photograph of men at lunch on a girder while building Radio City Music Halll, it was literally that photograph come to life as the men who are building the future of this country are the very men the men the country has forgotten. Forster also starred in workshop productions of Ravetch's plays Off Sides with Olympia Dukakis and Beacon with Brooke Shields and Kerr Smith.

Ravetch also directed Clifford Odets' The Big Knife; Thomas Babe's Prayer For My Daughter; John Patrick's Hasty Heart, and Ira Levin's Deathtrap, which garnered five Drama-Logue Awards, including awards for Director and Production.

Ravetch's other plays include The Light Bulb with Hart to Hart's Stefanie Powers in the workshop production, before its world premiere launch at the NoHo Arts Center. He also co-wrote One From the Hart, Powers' one-woman show that opened at the Orange County Performing Arts Centre. Also at The Coast Playhouse, Ravetch directed Bart Baker's play, Love Acts, with actress/supermodel Beverly Johnson. Johnson was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for her performance.

Ravetch's television credits include CBS' Joan of Arcadia, Titan for TNT, Horseshoe Bay for Warner Brothers, and Yesterday for Laura Ziskin Productions.

Stage