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Rick Elice is a Broadway script writer, Hollywood screenwriter, and author who has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career. Elice’s first Broadway credit, Jersey Boys, which he co-authored with Marshall Brickman, won the Tony Award, the Grammy Award and the Olivier Award for Best Musical, and is in the record books as the twelfth longest-running show in Broadway history. The Addams Family, which Elice wrote with Marshall Brickman and Andrew Lippa, regularly tops the charts as the most licensed musical in North America. His first play, Peter and the Starcatcher, which was directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, set a record in 2012 for the most Tony Award nominations for an American play in Broadway history (a record it held until this year). In all, the play won five Tony Awards. Elice also wrote the double Tony Award winning smash Broadway hit The Cher Show. His recent world premiere musicals include My Very Own British Invasion at the Paper Mill Playhouse; Dog and Pony at the Old Globe, directed by Roger Rees; and Turn of the Century, co-authored with Marshall Brickman and directed by Tommy Tune.
Elice’s current projects include the musicals The Princess Bride for Disney Theatrical Productions; Smash for Robert Greenblatt, Neil Meron, and Steven Spielberg with Bob Martin; Monopoly for Hasbro, with David Rossmer and Dan Lipton; and Mad Season, with Rob Thomas, Matt Serletic and Matt Walden of Matchbox Twenty. Elice is also working on adapting Sara Gruen’s popular novel Water for Elephants for the stage with the acclaimed theatre collective PigPen. In addition, he and Benjamin Scheuer, recipient of the 2021 Ed Kleban Award, are writing Treasure, a musical about the rivalry between Charles Darwin and Peter M. Roget, not to mention love, death, madness and the creation of Roget’s Thesaurus.
Elice was born in New York City and was the salutatorian graduate of Francis Lewis High School in Queens, New York. He earned degrees from Cornell University and the Yale Drama School, and from 1980–1981, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard University. He is a charter member of the American Repertory Theater and a trustee for The Actor’s Fund. From 1982–1999, as creative director at Serino Coyne Inc., he produced ad campaigns for some three hundred Broadway shows, from A Chorus Line to The Lion King. From 1999–2009, he served as a creative consultant for the Walt Disney Studio.
Elice’s book, Finding Roger: An Improbably Theatrical Love Story, is a tribute to his late husband, Roger Rees, and is published by Kingswell.
The appearance of Rick Elice is made possible by a generous gift from Tennessee Book Company.
