Boys in the Band comes to Broadway

[edjames]

He's OK

Saw him outside his condo building.

I'm sure they'll make some adjustments for his injury.

(He lives up the block, next door to Jimmy Fallon)

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Patti performed for the last six months of her last run with a bad hip. She made it look effortless.

 

After the run was over, she immediately went for a replacement so that she could be ready for her Company run on the West End.

 

That's a true show-person.

Edited May 15, 2018 by Benjamin_Nicholas

[N13]

Have tickets for tomorrow - Tuesday. Did they have a Monday performance?

[+ purplekow]

Was surprised to see Hello Dolly tickets for $39 with Bernadette Peters. I guess most are paying more to see Bette later on.

[+ WilliamM]

Patti performed for the last six months of her last run with a bad hip. She made it look effortless.

 

After the run was over, she immediately went for a replacement so that she could be ready for her Company run on the West End.

 

That's a true show-person.

 

Merman would have done the same. But, few legendary Broadway musical stars were working so often and and so hard at Patti's age. She deserve much credit.

[LaffingBear]

Lets review this timeline.

• Injured at end of Saturday matinee... thats probably 3:30ish?
  
• No show 8 pm same day.
  

And people are questioning "show-must-go-on" and "trouper".

 

What needed to occur in the four hours between matinee finale and decision-time regarding evening performance?

• "Uh oh, call the lawyers."
  
• An ER visit? Xrays?
  
• Time for possible swelling, evaluation?
  
• Treatment/taping/boot-fitting?
  
• Discussion with actor, cast, crew... "can you stand? Walk?" "How can we adjust staging?" Assessment of understudy readiness?
  
• Consideration of ticket-holders.... an awareness that the sooner is better than later when cancellation is possible?
  

[Cooper]

Having seen this play I can understand why Jim Parsons’ foot injury would be taken very seriously.

 

The set is a duplex apartment. Parsons climbs the staircase several times. An injured foot could make that a difficult task. I don’t think a boot or crutches would make it any easier.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Having seen this play I can understand why Jim Parsons’ foot injury would be taken very seriously.

 

The set is a duplex apartment. Parsons climbs the staircase several times. An injured foot could make that a difficult task. I don’t think a boot or crutches would make it any easier.

 

Would he do better if he were wearing a pair of Isotoner slippers?

 

(bonus points for those who know what I'm referring to)

[N13]

Saw the play tonight. First we were very lucky that Parsons was able to perform (albeit with a brace shoe and a cane) this being his first performance after tripping on the stair at the Saturday afternoon curtain call. Mixed feelings about the production though. Having seen the original off-Broadway production and the subsequent film, the performances given by Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman and Kenneth Nelson which were iconic, resulted in the show being a shadow rather than a full experience for me. It was interesting seeing other actors in their rolls, but it is like trying to top Merman in Gypsy...no matter how good it is impossible to come up to the original.

 

Parsons, for me, is in the same category as James Stewart - no matter what role he plays - or how good he is - he is always himself. His persona does not get lost in the part and this is a distraction. Zachary Quinto does a very creditable job but it pales in comparison to Frey's tour-de-force. Robin De Jesus as Emory also had an impossible act to follow. Gorman was Emory and no one else will ever be able to top or even come up to what he did with the part. Kenneth Nelson embodied Michael in my opinion. There was a pathos that was mesmerizing in Nelson's performance.

 

The standout performance for me was Andrew Rannells as Larry. Charlie Carver as Cowboy was also right on. I am a big Matt Bomer fan, but the part is very low key. I think I would rather have seen him as Michael.

 

All that being said, I do think it was well worth it to see the play. Production was tight and acting good in all cases. I think I would have had a better reaction if I had not seen the original.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Parsons, for me, is in the same category as James Stewart - no matter what role he plays - or how good he is - he is always himself.

 

Exactly. And it's why I'm totally uninterested in ever seeing him onstage again. He's one-note.

 

His understudy, Matt McGrath, is a superior actor. I'd have loved to see him go on for Parsons during the absence.

[foxy]

I saw the play a few weeks ago and when Parsons came out on stage the audience screamed and applauded wildly. I thought WTF? I knew he had that tv show which I’ve never watched but you would have thought he was the biggest star to ever appear on a Broadway stage. The audience did go on to scream and applaud the next few actors but then quieted down until the acting began. Behind me was a group of women who SCREAMED insanely at every line, funny or not. I thought what drug is this audience on? One of the more unpleasant theater experiences I’ve ever had. I was almost tempted to get up and walk out but as the play became more serious they settled down. A little. It was a bizarre experience. I still don’t like the play even if the audience had acted normally.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I saw the play a few weeks ago and when Parsons came out on stage the audience screamed and applauded wildly. I thought WTF? I knew he had that tv show which I’ve never watched but you would have thought he was the biggest star to ever appear on a Broadway stage. The audience did go on to scream and applaud the next few actors but then quieted down until the acting began. Behind me was a group of women who SCREAMED insanely at every line, funny or not. I thought what drug is this audience on? One of the more unpleasant theater experiences I’ve ever had. I was almost tempted to get up and walk out but as the play became more serious they settled down. A little. It was a bizarre experience. I still don’t like the play even if the audience had acted normally.

 

Welcome to the new normal of theatre going: Where a B-list TV actor is box office gold and an audience can't wait to draw attention... To themselves.

It's also why I pick what I see more carefully these days. Three Tall Women isn't going to attract that crowd. Neither does My Fair Lady.

[+ sf westcoaster]

Parson's understudy, Matt McGrath performed the day I saw the show. He clearly was not ready and flubbed a number of his lines. That aside, he did give a very decent performance.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Parson's understudy, Matt McGrath performed the day I saw the show. He clearly was not ready and flubbed a number of his lines. That aside, he did give a very decent performance.

 

You do realize that McGrath had nearly no rehearsal time and is in the middle of doing two shows simultaneously.

 

He called for two lines. That's not too shabby.

[RyanDean]

I'm quite fond (in a strange way) of this play, so I'm very glad I got to see this production. Disappointed by the limits of Parsons' performance, but really impressed by Matt Bomer, Michael Benjamin Washington, and Tuc Watkins in the trickier, less showy roles. And whatta set!

[Okliehomo]

Have seen the movie about a million times. An obsession of my youth and further evidence of how desperate I was back then for anything remotely gay in Oklahoma... anyway, has anyone heard anything about them filming this production like for Netflix?

 

Anything for a sis, Mary!!

[RyanDean]

No buzz on filming this one...yet.

[RyanDean]

And sorry I missed THIS performance...

http://www.newnownext.com/matt-bomer-naked-boys-in-the-band/05/2018/

[+ WilliamM]

http://static.playbill.com/dims4/default/6c5c60e/2147483647/resize/800x450/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.playbill.com%2Fe2%2Faa%2Fdf1a934f47f6a858c9b68f6e28d8%2Fthe-boys-in-the-band-broaway-production-photo-2018-099-matt-bomer-and-jim-parsons-in-the-boys-in-the-band-photo-by-joan-marcus-2018-hr.jpg

[edjames]

Review: Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto Enter Sniping in ‘The Boys in the Band’

By Ben Brantley. May 31, 2018

Holy social anthropology! What is this strange and barbaric tribal ceremony that our unsuspecting traveler has stumbled upon? Men are actually dancing with — gasp — other men, in a wrist-flicking, hip-wriggling, keister-twitching chorus line.

Perhaps they’re enacting some unspeakable mating ritual, the kind an adventurous American couple of the mid-1960s might have seen (and recoiled from) while watching

But this is definitely not the sort of activity Joe Average expects to encounter in the apartment of his best friend from college.

That, more or less, is the point of view of a lone, presumably heterosexual man when he arrives as an uninvited guest at the all-gay party of hedonism and hatred that is Mart Crowley’s epochal 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band,” which opened on Thursday night in a starry but disconnected revival at the Booth Theater. And theatergoers, too, may feel an awakening shock at this moment.

Because, really, all the insinuating antics onstage — laced with frisky innuendos and stinging zingers — feel pretty humdrum to latter-day viewers, not so different from an episode of “Will & Grace.” What’s so shocking is how shocked the recent arrival appears, and what a pall of cold shame his disapproving presence casts over what has been a moment of joy, perhaps the only one the play allows.

This sudden plummeting of emotional temperature jolted me into a painful, present-tense awareness of how truly ghettoized — and terrifying — life was for most American gay men when “Boys” opened Off Broadway. I was a 13-year-old North Carolina middle-school student then, and secretly followed the coverage of what became a Cultural Event with an uneasy fascination.

Though I hadn’t read the play, all accounts of it suggested that no one in his right mind would want to grow up to be like the miserable and vicious misfits it depicted. In his original New York Times review, Clive Barnes spoke of “the special self-dramatization and the frightening self-pity — true I suppose of all minorities, but especially true of homosexuals.”

And I thought that was just how teenagers were! I got myself a (temporary) girlfriend, pronto.

So it is definitely a cause for celebration that the self-loathing title characters of “Boys” are now being portrayed — in the play’s Broadway debut — by successful, and in some cases wildly popular, mainstream actors who are (to use a quaint phrase) openly gay. They include Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”), Zachary Quinto (the J. J. Abrams “Star Trek” films) and Matt Bomer (“White Collar”).

I wish I could report that this charismatic and capable team, directed by the busy Joe Mantello, transported me vividly and uncompromisingly into the dark ages of homosexual life in these United States, and that I shuddered and sobbed in sympathy. But even trimmed from two acts to an intermission-free 110 minutes, the show left me largely impatient and unmoved.

Part of this is a matter of the miscasting of the production’s biggest marquee names, the seriously talented Mr. Parsons and Mr. Quinto. More important, though, is that this real-time drama only rarely seems to be happening in real time, with real feelings.

The bitchy quips are all delivered and landed with deft comic timing, and the show is an entertaining primer in the now widely accepted art of throwing shade. But I had to strain to imagine the boys of “Boys” were a blood-bound clan, better known to one another than their natural-born families were. And without that illusion of chosen consanguinity, the expositional creakiness of Mr. Crowley’s script is laid unflatteringly bare.

The structure of “Boys” is not unlike that of an earlier scandalous sensation of a play, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”(There’s an allusion to Albee — whom one character confuses with Tennessee Williams — in the original text for “Boys.”) As in “Woolf,” a party is being thrown, like a sharp-edged stone from a slingshot, and wicked games will be played.

 

The host in this case is Michael (Mr. Parsons), a writer and semi-lapsed Catholic living — on maxed-out credit cards — in a sumptuous red velvet duplex in Manhattan’s East 50s. (David Zinn did the set, along with the refreshingly unexaggerated period costumes.) Michael is a withering wit and a hostile drunk; he has been off the sauce for five weeks when the play begins, and intends to stay that way.

Fat chance, with the birthday party that’s happening tonight. It’s for Michael’s best frenemy, the misanthropic Harold (Mr. Quinto), for whom a social event means getting stoned and camouflaged in makeup (he has a pockmarked face) well in advance. As for the rest of the guests, I can’t improve on Pauline Kael’s description of them, in her review of

, as “a 40s-movie bomber-crew cast: a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, a hustler. …”

Ticking off these boxes are a solid Mr. Bomer as Donald, Michael’s former lover and a fellow analysand (the parent-blaming specter of Freud hovers); Andrew Rannells (of “The Book of Mormon” and “Falsettos”) as Larry, a commercial artist; and Tuc Watkins as Hank, who has left his wife for Larry. Michael Benjamin Washington is Bernard, whose status as an African-American is the butt of the show’s nastiest humor. Bernard swaps stereotyping digs with Robin de Jesús’s (excellent) Emory, the most flamboyantly effeminate of the lot.

Then there are the outsiders: the Cowboy (Charlie Carver) of the midnight variety, who has been purchased by Emory as a birthday present for Harold, and the unlucky Alan (Brian Hutchison), that old roommate of Michael, whose arrival lights the fuse on the time bomb.

Michael falls off the wagon — a moment signaled by an action-freezing, sepulchral spotlight, courtesy of the lighting designer Hugh Vanstone — and initiates an especially cruel, soul-baring party game. Make way for regrets, recriminations and the basis for a lifelong hangover.

Of course what happens after Alan (who swears he didn’t know Michael was gay) shows up isn’t all that different from before. Most of the characters are, like the play itself, diagnosticians of their sexual identities, and there’s a lot of “this is how we are, and how we got that way” soliloquizing.

Some of the fattier sections of such discourse have been trimmed away. But so, more damagingly, have many of the old movie references that establish Michael as a loving practitioner of camp, as both a source of genuine pleasure and a defense system.

These deletions make Michael seem like more of a bitter scold than he is already. On its own terms, Mr. Parsons’s self-contained, slow-burn performance is impressive. But in mannerisms and voice, this guy is too tight, too cautious to be the extravagant, escapist playboy he is said to be.

As his arch-nemesis, Harold, a heavily made-up Mr. Quinto, registers as an inhuman visitor from another planet, an effect that sometimes happens when handsome actors play ugly. His line readings sound as if they come straight from the crypt, making Harold’s pronouncements disproportionately oracular and ominous. (Harold to Michael: “We tread very softly with each other because we both play each other’s game too well.”)

The rest of the cast is just fine, and they’re never better than when the boys are happily at play, dancing and camping and exchanging choice put-downs. But because they’re so endlessly, openly analytical, there’s no subtext for the actors to play, which means the big “reveals” aren’t all that revealing.

There is one superlative performance, however, that provides the show with its most genuinely moving moments. That comes from Mr. de Jesús, whose unapologetically nelly Emory slowly displays an innate dignity beneath the flippancy and frivolity.

In the 2010 revival of “La Cage aux Folles,” Mr. de Jesús portrayed a similar archetype, which he took so far over the top you expected him to float away. In this role, he grounds the classically effeminate gay man in a bedrock of genuine pain, yes, but also resilience.

Some pundits who see “Boys” as a sort of positive prophecy have said that they could imagine Emory later joining the barricades during the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Mr. de Jesús justifies that prediction, and makes — who’d have thought it? — silly old Emory the best reason to hope for the futures of the time-warped boys of this disharmonious band.

[+ WilliamM]

THEATER REVIEW Vultur

May 31, 201810:00 pm

Theater Review: Can The Boys in the Band Work in 2018?

By Sara HoldrenShare

 

The Boys in the Band, at the Booth. Photo: ©2018 Joan Marcus

 

Attending the still-contentious, oddly timed, star-studded 50th anniversary Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s 1968 gay-theater trailblazer, The Boys in the Band, is a strange, somewhat removed experience. At least, it was for me, though I was surrounded by a packed house that breathlessly applauded every celebrity entrance, yelped with delighted laughter at every dig and burn, and rocketed to their feet when the lights went down. I don’t want to patronize my fellow audience members: There are surely things to be enthusiastic about in Joe Mantello’s glitzy, solidly acted revival, perhaps most of all the commitment of its producers, David Stone and the seemingly omnipotent Ryan Murphy, to assembling a complete cast of openly gay actors, a feat that would have been impossible when the original production shocked and captivated New York a year before Stonewall. While many of the actors in the 1968 cast (and William Friedkin’sensuing 1970 film) were gay, none were out, and by 1993 five of the nine, along with the play’s original director and producer, had died of AIDS.

 

Fifty years later, Murphy is spearheading the Boys’ comeback with, it seems, the dual motive of celebrating and interrogating how far the world has advanced in half a century. Talking to Jesse Green in theTimes in February, Murphy honored the courage of this revival’s cast — “[They’re] the first generation of gay actors who said, ‘We’re going to live authentic lives and hope and pray our careers remain on track,’ and they have” — and questioned whether we’re “really so much better off” today. The answer to that might be the same as the answer to the question, “Do we really need a Boys in the Vandd revival?” or, now that we have one, “So is it any good?”

 

 

That may not jibe with our current culture of self-care and aggressive positivity, but it’s a real thing, and not just a dated one. We may not like to look at it, but the ways in which shame, insecurity, and self-directed anger and hatred eat away at us — and then fling themselves outward at undeserving targets because we can’t bear the gnawing anymore — aren’t the stuff of any particular time period, nor even of any specific marginalized sexuality. Like walking upright, writing plays, and waging war, self-loathing is a human condition, and when Jim Parsons’s Michael — the party’s host and the play’s turbulent center — collapses into his ex-boyfriend’s arms at night’s end, gasping, “If we … if we could just … learn, not to hate ourselves so much” — well, I felt it, and it hurt.

 

Given that there’s something still alive, and still painful, at the heart of The Boys in the Band, how does one explain the museum-piecey-ness that still overwhelms this production? Eight years ago, the Transport Group tackled the play, and as I watched Mantello’s high-budget gloss on it, I found myself wishing I had seen that 2010 version, directed by Jack Cummings III. Cummings’s scrappy company does smart, soulful, low-fi interpretations of American classic plays that, so far as I’ve seen, often succeed brilliantly in cracking through the carapace of that problematic, baggage-dragging behemoth we like to call the “canon.” Here, by contrast, Murphy and Mantello seem content to be mounting a glamorous case for Boys’ canonical status. They’re presenting an extravagant time capsule of sorts where even Parsons’s purple V-neck sweater and the black-turtlenecked promo shots of the cast hearken straight back to the iconography of the original production — as if to say, “Remember this thing. It was important. Here, we have brought it back for you, this time with more TV stars!”

 

Well, it was important. And the TV stars are pretty good! Parsons gives an inexhaustible, zingy performance as Michael, full of roiling nastiness and sadness (and on a recovering foot, too). Matt Bomer is quietly affecting as his ex and foil, the moody but kind-hearted Donald, and the cast’s starriest member, Zachary Quinto, is doing something rather fabulous with the drugged up, dripping-with-sarcasm birthday boy, Harold: He’s playing one note, a bass drone of lugubrious, bone-dry disaffection, which should feel unvaried and caricature-ish but somehow manages to walk right up to that cliff without tipping over it. And his last words to Michael, after the freshly fallen-off-the-wagon host has launched brutal emotional attacks on practically everyone at the party, is a wry little heartbreaker: “Oh, Michael … Thanks for the laughs. Call you tomorrow.”

 

It’s not the screen stars, though, who are consistently turning in the production’s most moving work. As Bernard — the group’s one black man, who gracefully endures both casual and drunkenly caustic racism — and as Emory, the most femme of the boys (and, here, the only other person of color), Michael Benjamin Washington and Robin de Jesús often feel like the show’s real heart. De Jesús’s energy is exhilarating: He laughs, prances, and refuses to tamp himself down when Alan (a tortured Brian Hutchison), Michael’s conservative former college roommate, crashes the party. He also shows deep wells of pity — he ends up feeling for the distressed Alan, who earlier socked him in the mouth in a burst of homophobic panic and rage — and a sincere willingness to listen and change. “Bernard, forgive me,” he begs, after Michael has lambasted Emory’s tendency to “Uncle Tom” his friend. “I’m sorry. I won’t ever say those things to you again.”

 

And Washington, in his turn, plays a man with much more under the surface than he’s letting on, a man who, unlike Michael, doesn’t have the luxury of lashing out. “I let [Emory] Uncle Tom me,” Bernard tells Michael, calmly but through gritted teeth: “I don’t like it from him and I don’t like it from me — but I do it to myself and I let him do it … We both got the short end of the stick — but I got a hell of a lot more than he did and he knows it … He can do it, Michael. I can do it. Butyou can’t do it.”

 

Emory and Bernard’s relationship feels particularly poignant, not to mention painful, in 2018. They often quietly support each other in the background — eventually, Emory physically holds up a wasted, heartbroken Bernard as they make their exit — standing apart in this group of white boys who are sniping and throwing shade in a ridiculously expensive apartment where the up-to-his-receding-hairline-in-debt Michael has earlier thrown Hermès sweaters on the floor.

 

 

In a way, a production this shiny is always going to be more commemoration than eviscerating reinvestigation. There’s a giddy energy in the audience of the Booth Theatre, and every one of Crowley’s catty zingers is met with cheers and laughter, almost as if we’ve all gotten together to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race. Perhaps The Boys in the Band helped pave the way for “Shante, you stay” (Mantello has argued that the play itself made it possible for people to criticize the play, and he’s got a point), but it’s also a very different creature. No one on this stage has yet followed through on Mama Ru’s famous mantra: “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?” And it seems a little strange that a story of fear and loathing is being met by an auditorium full of “Yas Kween” effervescence — not to mention unabashed enthusiasm for various cast members’ ripped physiques. At one point Bomer’s Donald enters and jokingly asks “Am I stunning?” and a friend told me that in the performance he saw, a woman behind him screamed, “Yes!”

 

Perhaps this is all to the good. To the actors who risked their careers to do The Boys in the Band in 1968, a packed Broadway house full of excited, supportive, here-for-it fans would probably be an incredible sight, and a profound one. But the question remains — with Boys andAngels running now and Second Stage’s Torch Song revival soon to join them — of where to find today’s unwieldy, controversial, imperfect, brilliant answers to these plays. While present-day Broadway continues to polish up the plays that broke years past, the plays that will break 2018 are more likely to be found, like the originalBoys, beyond the moneyed edifices of midtown. Meanwhile, the arc of history is long, and let’s hope it continues to bend ever more toward fabulousness — and toward new, and newly contentious, adventure

[+ Cash4Trash]

I did see the Transport Group's production 8 years ago and that is the reason I've decided not to see it again now. The Transport Group did the play in a loft, the audience was on 3 sides and the wide aisles between sections were

part of the set. I remember that the apartments bar was at the head of the aisle where I sat, a lot of running back and forth. The effect was that we were all guests at the party but just never said anything. It was very powerful and I can't imagine

seeing a conventional proscenium production now.

[foxy]

I’m sorry to read in this last review that the audience continues to behave in such bizarre behavior. I can’t for the life of me comprehend it. Mass hysteria I suppose. I’ll stop going to the theater entirely if this continues. I felt like I was at a sporting event where screaming seems more appropriate.

[RyanDean]

I didn't find the audience to be distracting.

Entrance applause is always tedious (to me) and the audience definitely laughed (with, not at) the camp humor.

And while I recognize the vibe that the Holdren review describes, I didn't see/hear it too much from the audience response.

But I didn't have a screaming clacque behind me like @foxy did (at least not here...but down the street at HelloDolly this week, I did experience shrieking hysterics on all sides.)

[edjames]

Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones, or I've just been purchasing too many damn expensive seats, but I have to say that at last night's performance of Boys, I found the audience polite and well-behaved. I have to say, I had some hesitation about seeing this show, again, but I found it more enjoyable this time around. If I had any criticisms, I'd say Andrew Rannells, Matt Bomer and Charlie Carver are all too damn handsome, pretty and cute. Very distracting! LOL. The other criticism is that I find Jim Parsons has become too associated with his character of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory. I can't help watching him and wondering if he's sometime channeling Sheldon in his performance. I wondered if perhaps Eric McCormick would have been a better choice as Michael. AND, just because I'm a fan, I loved the music of my era, and especially Dusty Springfield's Look Of Love as the audience exited the theater.

 

Also, my experience at Harry Potter was similar. the audience around me was polite and quiet. We had some young teenagers in my row, but they, too, were quiet and into the show. Not a lot of hooting' and hollering' on stage entrances.