Sizzle Stage & Screen creates original musicals designed from day one for the stage, screen, and streaming. Our inaugural production, Daze of Discovery, pioneers a hybrid production model that combines live theatre, cinematic capture, virtual production, and AI-assisted workflows to transform a single creative work into multiple entertainment experiences.
We embrace artist-controlled AI as Accelerated Innovation—using artificial intelligence responsibly to enhance creativity, streamline production, and expand audience reach. AI supports our artists; it never replaces them. Every creative decision remains guided by human imagination, collaboration, and craftsmanship.
A key component of Sizzle's commercial strategy is securing one or more internationally recognizable performers whose participation elevates the project's profile and profits across all platforms.
With a production budget of $1 million and a 12-month development and production schedule, Sizzle will create an integrated portfolio of assets from a single creative effort, including:
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A fully staged live musical designed for commercial presentation.
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A professionally filmed live performance for streaming, broadcast, and educational distribution.
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A feature-length animated musical created with an AI-enhanced production pipeline.
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Original soundtrack recordings and music publishing assets.
One Story. Many Stages. Exponential Potential.
Daze of Discovery is an irreverent animated musical that blends history, mythology, romance, and mischief to tell the coming-of-age story of Kam (the future King Kamehameha the Great) during Hawaii’s first recorded contact with the Western world in 1779.
The story follows Kam’s deep aikāne relationship with his friend Wiki (male intimacy, common in the culture then) and his unlikely friendship with explorer Captain James Cook, whose arrival changes the islands forever.
With vibrant songs, gods, and adventure, Daze of Discovery explores love, identity, leadership, and cultural collision from an Old Hawaiian perspective.
It stands out as one of the first musicals to center a historic LGBTQ+ hero and to portray both Captain Cook’s story and the diversity of relationships in pre-contact Hawaiian society.
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THE MUSIC
CREATIVE TEAM
DAVID SECTER
BOOK AND LYRICS
RUBEN ESTEVEZ
MUSIC
David Secter is an award-winning writer/producer/director of film, theater and television. He lives in Kona on the big island of Hawaii, where he has completed the book and lyrics for Rule of Fire, A New Musical In Old Hawaii. Secter’s movie Winter Kept Us Warm was the first Canadian feature selected for the Cannes Film Festival and is included in the book series Queer Film Classics from McGill-Queens University Press. His movie The Offering was nominated as Canada’s Best Picture of the Year and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Additional film credits include the comedy Getting Together, released by Troma as Feelin’ Up; Take the Flame! a Gay Games documentary narrated by Greg Louganis; Pacific Passions about the Festival of Pacific Arts; BURN on the Burning Man festival; and CyberDorm, a campus comedy about early webcasts.
During ten years as CEO of EnterMedia, a Manhattan arts center in a historic 1100 seat playhouse, he produced and presented Obie-award winning plays and launched such long-running Broadway musical hits as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Secter wrote the book and lyrics and produced the celebrated Off-Broadway musical Get Thee to Canterbury and created Banjos and Bugles, a civil war docudramusical. A lifetime member of The Dramatists Guild, he is the subject of The Best of Secter and The Rest of Secter, an award-winning doc on YouTube.
At the early age of five, Ruben Estevez began playing the piano and writing poetry in his hometown of Houston, Texas. As he got older, his love for creative storytelling continued to evolve; and in 1995, Ruben decided to move to Nashville to pursue his passion for songwriting. He landed a publishing deal with Word Records, followed by a string of Contemporary Christian Music cuts. In the Country Music genre, Ruben won the Grand Prize in The Music City Songwriter competition with his song "Lie." In the summer of 2013, "Lie" was cut by Tracy Lawrence on his "Headlights, Taillights and Radios" album and became his third single in late February 2014.
In early 2019, after an inspirational trip to New York City, Ruben put pen to paper in a different form. He decided to write an entire musical based on his personal experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s in Texas, as a closeted gay man in an extremely homophobic culture. One year later, he completed this work, titled Marcos, writing not only the music and lyrics of all the songs, but also the fictional libretto itself. Shortly after Marcos was finished, he began working on another fictional project about a young woman looking for a fresh start in a new town, HAUNT. He recently completed creating the score for the original musical Plane Jane.
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