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:
-
A fully staged live musical designed for commercial presentation.
-
A professionally filmed live performance for streaming, broadcast, and educational distribution.
-
A feature-length animated musical created with an AI-enhanced production pipeline.
-
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.
1.
ACT I
2.
ACT I
3.
ACT I
4.
ACT I
5.
ACT I
6.
ACT I
7.
ACT I
8.
ACT I
9.
ACT I
10.
ACT I
THE MUSIC
CREATIVE TEAM
DAVID SECTER
BOOK AND LYRICS
David Secter is an award-winning writer/producer/director of film, theater and television. He has been living on the Big Island of Hawaii where he wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Daze Of Discovery - Heated Revelry 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. A 4K restoration is now distributed by Canadian International Pictures, streams on TCM, and the blu-ray edition includes the award-winning doc The Best of Secter and The Rest of Secter. His next movie The Offering was nominated as Canada’s best picture of the year and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Additional film credits include the indie comedy Getting Together, released by Troma as Feelin’ Up; Take The Flame, a gay games doc narrated by Greg Louganis; Pacific Passions about the Festival of Pacific Arts; BURN on Burning Man; and CyberDorm, an offbeat comedy about early webcasts.
During 10 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 long-running Broadway musicals as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Secter also wrote the book and lyrics and produced the celebrated Off-Broadway musical Get Thee To Canterbury and created Banjos & Bugles, a civil war docudramusical. As a lifetime member of The Dramatists Guild, he plans to combine his love of theater and film with Sizzle Stage & Screen.
RUBEN ESTEVEZ
MUSIC
Ruben Estevez began playing piano and writing poetry at just five years old in his hometown of Houston, Texas — an early spark for storytelling that never faded. In 1995, he moved to Nashville to pursue songwriting in earnest, landing a publishing deal with Word Records and a string of Contemporary Christian Music cuts along the way.
In the Country genre, Ruben's song "Lie" won the Grand Prize at The Music City Songwriter competition. In summer 2013, it was recorded by Tracy Lawrence for his album Headlights, Taillights and Radios, releasing as his third single in February 2014.
In early 2019, a trip to New York City sparked something new: the desire to tell a bigger, more personal story. Ruben set out to write his first full-length musical, drawing on his own experience growing up gay in 1970s and '80s Texas. A year later, he'd completed Marcos, writing the music, lyrics, and libretto himself.
That project marked a turning point, and Ruben hasn't slowed down since. He went on to write HAUNT, about a young woman who moves into a new home only to discover it's haunted, and Plane Jane, a musical comedy following a flight attendant whose life is forever changed by one fateful flight. Most recently, he collaborated with David on Daze of Discovery, composing the score for David's script. From Music Row to the stage, Ruben keeps bringing the same honest, playful craft to every story he tells.
JOIN THE CLUB