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Vegas headliner Danny Gans remembered in Sunscreen doc
The Sunscreen Film Festival runs April 30-May 3 in St. Petersburg.
Las Vegas singer, comedian and impressionist Danny Gans was billed as The Man of Many Voices. And for 12 of the 13 years Gans headlined in the big showrooms, he was voted Las Vegas Entertainer of the Year.
At some point, a journalist gave him a third title: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of.
“He didn’t take it offensively,” says Danny’s son, filmmaker Andrew Davies Gans. “He just leaned into it, because it added to this mystique about the ‘Man of Many Voices’ and the ‘Entertainer of the Year.’ It was like ‘Who is this guy? I have to go see this show.’
“It created this sense of urgency in people to go see Danny Gans. This was before YouTube and before social media, so if you looked online there was no reference. You would hear about him, and you had to go see the show.”
Danny Gans died in 2009, at age 52, and honoring his show business legacy became one of his son’s priorities. Voices: The Danny Gans Story, is an official selection of the 2026 Sunscreen Film Festival. The documentary will be screened Friday as part of the Sunscreen Film Festival at the AMC Sundial theaters in St. Petersburg.
“I’d been producing films for several years before I decided to do this,” Andrew explains. “I was having dinner with my family on the 10th anniversary of my dad’s death, and we were talking about how fast 10 years had gone by. I was thinking about how I didn’t feel like my dad was remembered the way that I felt he deserved. And I wanted to do something about that.
“And I felt I was prepared and experienced enough to go ahead and direct a film. I felt like starting with this was very fitting.
“Then once we got into production, I realized how much of a transformative journey I was going on personally, getting to know him better. And during the making of the film, I became a dad myself. And it kinda took on a life of its own at that point.”
Although Voices is packed with performance footage of Gans singing in the guise of one celebrity after another, and sometimes in his own clear tenor voice, the biographical elements make the movie hum.
The California-born son of a failed professional baseball player, Gans was himself drafted by the Chicago White Sox. An on-field injury ended his sports career, so he turned to his other great passion, making people laugh.
While working as a nightclub comic and impressionist, Gans was in the cast of the Ellen DeGeneres sitcom Open House, appeared a few times in the cop series Silk Stalkings and had a small role in Kevin Costner’s Bull Durham.
“I think at the time when Bull Durham did not blow up his career in Hollywood, it was a disappointment,” Andrew Gans reflects, “but it all lead to Vegas, which is where he was most happy.”
Prior to taking up resident in the Nevada desert, Danny worked as a corporate entertainer, flying around the country to perform at private events for the likes of McDonald’s and IBM. At his peak, he was playing 220 corporate shows per year.
Voices chronicles Danny’s decision to cut back on these dates once the first Vegas offer came in. His wife and children, in California, got used to not seeing him all that often when he weas jetting off for corporate gigs. And that bugged him.
When he was at home, Andrew recalls, “he was very present. He was very devoted to being a father and husband when he was there, and I think he knew that it was a very challenging setup. He was walking a path that had not been walked by very many people.
“There was no right way or wrong way, really, to do this. He was just kind of figuring it out as he went along.”
The Vegas residencies meant the family could move to Nevada, and Danny could sleep at home in his own bed every night.
Performers Tony Orlando, Louie Anderson, Donny Osmond and Terry Fator are interviewed in the film, as are members of Gans’ band, Vegas entrepreneurial legend Steve Wynn and numerous other friends and colleagues.
Today, Andrew explains, there’s no Danny Gans Avenue in Vegas, nor is there a theater named for him.
“It’s a very easy argument to say that he was the best Vegas entertainer of all time,” the filmmaker states. “Because everybody else that went to Vegas, like Frank Sinatra, Elvis and Liberace, they were all massive stars before they went to Vegas. And more recently, Celine Dion or Shania Twain.
“My dad was an unknown who came to Vegas and exploded. And became a household name.
Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody’s come close to it since.”
Voices: The Danny Gans Story will be shown at 9 a.m. Friday, May 1 at AMC Theaters, 151 Second Avenue N. (Sundial), St. Petersburg. Tickets are at this link.
