Suffused with period songs (swing, big band, boogie-woogie), Yank! explores what stories get told in wartime, and how World War II became the great catalyst in bringing gay men and women together.

Book and lyrics by David Zellnik
Music by Joe Zellnik
Directed by Igor Goldin
Choreography by Jeffry Denman
Musical direction by Amy Dalton

The Zellnik brothers and Goldin have just completed two developmental readings of Yank! in New York, hosted by The York Theatre Company, preparing for a possible Off-Broadway production in 2008-2009. Yank! was performed at Brooklyn’s The Gallery Players last fall, the first new book musical that theatre had produced in a generation, garnering enthusiastic reviews, sold out crowds and the production was recently nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. Previously, the show was at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2005, where it had a completely sold-out run and won an audience award for Best Musical. Diversionary's production is the West Coast premiere.

David and Joe Zellnik have collaborated on the musicals First in Flight: The Wright Brothers for TheaterworksUSA, which toured the country to raves in 2004-05, and City of Dreams, which was performed at the first International Music Theatre Festival (Cardiff, Wales 2002), the Midtown International Theatre Festival (New York, 2002), and which won the National Music Theatre Network competition in 2003. Two songs from City of Dreams appear on Alison Fraser's album Men in My Life.

Yank! gets it title from Yank magazine, which grew to become the most widely read and most popular magazine in the history of the U.S. Army. At the height of the magazine's operations, there were printing presses in Honolulu, Cairo, Tokyo, Okinawa, Rome, Trinidad, Saipan and other places, and the weekly achieved a worldwide circulation of 2,600,000. It is thought to have been read by ten million. The magazine, which was staffed entirely by enlisted soldiers, printed its last issue in December 1945, realizing for the War Department a profit of $1,000,000.