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40 Years Ago: How “Boys in the Band” saved my life

I didn’t know there WAS a gay bar in Binghamton.

When I was a janitor in Binghamton City Hall, cleaning up after the cops, and living in my Grandma Williams’ shack of a house, there was very little to look forward to. I’d see my friend Carol a few times a week, and a good thing too, because I would have been totally crazy otherwise.

My sister Leslie was in town, but she was busy in college and spending time with her boyfriend Eric, whom she would marry on Halloween of that year, 1975.

She was also in a few productions, including “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum,” at the Civic Theater. The lead in this play was a guy named Charlie.

Charlie’s next theatrical gig would be directing a play called Boys in the Band. It was first performed in New York City in 1968, and made into a movie in 1970. The storyline was about a birthday party one gay man named “Michael,” was throwing for a friend of his, “Donald.” One of the characters, “Bernard,” was specifically black.

When I met Charlie after a performance of “Forum,” he wondered if I were a thespian, like my sister, and asked me to audition. I hadn’t acted since high school, five years earlier, but I got the part; I suspect there was little or no competition for the role.

The six weeks of rehearsal were great. I had time to memorize my lines; because I really had little else going on in my life, the play became the primary focus. The cast hung out a few times, once at someone’s house, where a debate of the strength of Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon album raged; I probably should have played side two first.

We went to a gay bar in Binghamton, only a couple blocks from where I went to high school. I didn’t know there WAS a gay bar in Binghamton; it might have been established while I was away in college. In any case, a few guys there seemed interested in me, and I was oddly pleased.

The lead character “Michael” was played by a guy named Bill, one of the straight men in the cast. He usually gave me a ride home after rehearsal, and we often talked about the nascent sociopolitical gay rights movement, which in its own small way, the play was part of; and stereotypes.

We probably discussed the fact that “Bernard” was supposed to greet “Emory” with a kiss. I acknowledge that I resisted this the first four weeks of rehearsal, but not the last two, or the two or three presentations, by which point it was no big deal. I’m sure it helped that I had gotten to know the other actor, a guy named Mickey.

There’s a lengthy scene between “Michael” and his old friend “Alan”, while “Bernard” was passed out, drunk. I would feed Bill lines during rehearsal from memory because I was just lying on the stage. At one point, director Charlie, perhaps flattering me, or annoyed with Bill, said he wished I could have played the lead but couldn’t because he needed that black supporting character. I was perfectly happy with my relatively small part.

As I recall, the review in the local paper was less about the play or the performance, and more about the “cultural phenomenon of gay life” writ large on stage. One of my high school friends told the aforementioned friend Carol that it was “too bad” I was gay; Carol retorted, “He’s not gay!” But this perception was pretty widespread, as there was a black minister I met subsequently who expressed an unrequited interest in me.

There were guys I knew in high school who were gay, but only one who I knew was out. Performing in “Boys in the Band” was not only a great way to spend a few weeks but was a tremendous learning experience for me.

The Theater!

The Mac-Haydn Theatre is a 350-seat theater in the round, the stage is not huge, yet they use it and the various entrances and exits so well.

It’s peculiar that I hardly ever write about plays and musicals, given the fact that I go to them quite often, at various venues.

One great location is Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, pretty much the next city over from Albany, in the once a rundown vaudeville house that’s now a refurbished gem. Shows that had been on Broadway and are now touring show up here. It holds about 2700 patrons.

The Wife and I saw at least two shows in the 2010-11 season:
February 2011: Lion King. Astonishing, starting with the entrances from throughout the theater
May 2011: Hair. The story doesn’t age well, but it was still fun, with a lot of talented vocalists.

2011-2012:
Mar 2012: Jersey Boys. The story of The Four Seasons gave me a lot more respect for the singing group. Well done.
April 2012: Memphis. Apr 12 This is why I watch the Tonys; I wouldn’t have known what this award-winning show about music and race was about had I not seen it on the awards show. Good stuff.

As a result of these, we decided to get 2012-2013 season tickets:
October 2012: Mary Poppins. The one show we took The Daughter to, it was colourful and charming. We saw this only a few months after we saw the movie, the Daughter and I for the first time.
November 2012: Wicked. As good as was promised, and much more interesting than the book. The one musical I did review.
January 2013: Million Dollar Quartet. The heavily fictionalized story of a recording session with Presley, Cash, Lewis and Perkins. It was pretty good, but the performances at the end were great. There’s a chat with some of the actors after some Thursday afternoon performances, and these guys were particularly charming.
February 2013: Priscilla. Very entertaining, occasionally provocative show I enjoyed. No, I never saw the movie.
May 2013: Les Miserables. I had never seen a theatrical production. The movie I found to be tiresome. This production, though, I found wonderfully compeling, with some great singing, and touching acting performances.
An extra show we saw that season-
June 2013: Billy Elliot. While it took some wide swings between comedy and pathos, I did enjoy it quite a bit, and it was ultimately effective storytelling.

After watching the previews of the 2013-2014 season back in March, which included a singer from Sister Act, we signed up again. I was sold not just by the fact that Book of Mormon was on the roster, but by seeing the War Horse horse, live on stage. You can see the three people controlling the large puppet, yet you buy into the horse’s actions. The neighing comes from them making three different pitches.
September 2013: Ghost. This was the first Proctors show that I thought was an outright disappointment. It was as though they still needed to work out the pacing bugs. Worse, I never really believed the romance of the two main characters. But the woman playing the Whoopi Goldberg role was great. I liked, didn’t love the movie. Here’s the Broadway World website.
October 2013: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. Was it dance? Was it theater? Good chunks of the story made no sense to me. It LOOKED great, but left me cold. The Wife liked it more than I. Here’s the Nippertown review.
January 2014: War Horse. This is an extraordinary event, this horse who is thrown into war, and his owner who fights to find him. Quite intense sat times. There may have been something in my eye at the end.
February 2014: Sister Act. I had very low expectations of this, another Whoopi Goldberg movie made into a musical. But it was GOOD! Entertaining, funny. Arguably better than the movie.
March 2014: Book of Mormon. I did not see. I was in the hospital with The Daughter. The Wife went – I told her if she had to stay all night at the hospital, I’d stay all day. She thought BOM was too raunchy for her taste.
May 2014: Phantom of the Opera. This was a new production, but since it was a totally unknown commodity, it didn’t matter. While we liked it quite a bit, we were both confused by a few things that maybe would have made more sense to a veteran of the musical.

Thus, for the 2014-2015 season, we opted out of getting season tickets again. It’s not that some of the shows were disappointing. It is that too many of the shows are familiar.
Newsies • Oct 11-17, 2014 – The Daughter and I saw this on Broadway in February 2014, only her second trip to NYC. It was really good, especially the second act, but I don’t need to see it again. Maybe The Wife will go with a friend.
Jersey Boys • Jan 13-18, 2015 – Saw this a couple years ago, and don’t need to see it again so soon.
The Illusionists Witness the Impossible • Feb 17-22, 2015 – Have no feel for this, whether it’d be interesting to me.
Annie • Mar 3-8, 2015 – I’ve seen no fewer than three iterations of Annie in the past four years, including my niece in a high school production. Even though this will be “new”, I’ll pass.
Pippin • May 26-31, 2015- Now THIS I’ve wanted to see since seeing the TV ads for the original production 40 YEARS AGO.
Kinky Boots • Jun 16-21, 2015 – And I’d see the recent Best Musical.

Another great venue is the Mac-Haydn Theatre, about 45 minutes away from Albany in Chatham, NY. It’s a 350-seat theater in the round, the stage is not huge, yet they use it and the various entrances and exits so well.

In June 2011, we saw The King and I, and the aforementioned Annie, and they were quite fine. This year, in June, we saw The Music Man, and Fiddler on the Roof. The former was quite good, but the latter, incredible. I can’t believe the number of people traveling on the stage without bumping into each other or falling off. This is my second-favorite musical, and it was a very worthy production. BTW, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who just turned 90, tells his story.

There have been plays in Washington Park in Albany for over a quarter-century, with the Park Playhouse, and I’ve seen 80% of them. The last two productions I recall seeing were West Side Story, my favorite musical, which I pretty much hated, especially the intermission huckstering; and Cabaret, which was considerably better.

Steamer 10 is a little community theater within walking distance of our house. It has a mixed fare of serious plays and things such as Robin Hood and the Good (& Bad) Fairies of Nottingham, which we took in back in March. But they’ve branched out; their production of Romeo & Juliet, outside near Lincoln Park, was quite fine, despite the incredible wind the day we saw it. Fortunately, my man Dan reviewed it.

For several different periods, but not in the past five years, I went to Capital Rep, an Equity theater. I know I saw these, and I may have forgotten one or three:
Dreaming Emmet by Toni Morrison (premiere)
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Fences by August Wilson
Halley’s Comet by John Amos
A Tuna Christmas by Williams, Sears & Howard
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, adapted by Frank Galati – a particularly clever staging
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (adapted by Christopher Sergel) – still powerful
Always…Patsy Cline by Ted Swindley
Over the Tavern by Tom Dudzick
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Pretty Fire by Charlayne Woodard
Forever Plaid by Stuart Ross
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol adapted by Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill
Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts
Menopause The Musical! by Jeanie Linders
Jacques Brel is Alive & Well & Living in Paris Words & Music by Jacques Brel, Conception, English Lyrics and Additional material by Eric Blau & Mort Shuman

The play’s the thing

The eleven brothers of Joseph often sat so that the letters on their shirts spelled out words, such as SIN.

As part of a busy summer, The Wife and I managed to see all three plays in Albany’s Washington Park, the latter with the Daughter and a couple of friends.

Late in July, we saw Cabaret. The reviewer in the local newspaper called it the best show Park Playhouse has ever done, and that’s over a span. I’ve gone to the vast majority of them, and I would tend to agree. What was frustrating, though, was this ongoing commentary from some guy who “seemed” to know what he was talking about who was picking apart. “The woman playing Sally Bowles is too old” was the only one I specifically remember. No, it’s not the Cabaret that I saw at the movies in 1972 with a young Liza Minelli and a fascinating Joel Grey, but it still delivered a wallop.

A couple of weeks later, we saw Hairspray, which, of course, was a 1988 movie that was turned into a Broadway musical that was turned into a movie musical. I’ve only seen the original 1988 movie, the John Waters flick with Divine, which I’ve recently borrowed from the library. The show was fine, but what was really lacking was a live band. The singers were obviously performing to a soundtrack. At least on one song, the track skipped like a defective CD. To her credit, the person placing Tracy’s mom, when the music as shut off, finished the song a capella. The sound was also mixed too low; I think Tracy’s dad, who was otherwise great, missed a sound cue, I suspect because he couldn’t hear it.

The following week, it was Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, performed by teenagers and a few tweens. I know this only from an LP that came out over 40 years ago. The actual musical has far more distinct songs, but, in the main, not better ones. The performances were uneven but fun; the five muses who essentially narrate the story had two girls who sang quite well, two that were uneven, and one not so good. Joseph and the Pharaoh as Elvis were quite good. The eleven brothers of Joseph often sat so that the letters on their shirts spelled out words, such as SIN, when they lied about Joseph’s “death” and GRIN, when they are all finally reunited.
***
From the movie Cabaret- Money.
The trailer for the original movie Hairspray.
The Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat movie, starring Donny Osmond.

From CBS Sunday Morning:
“Shakespeare in the Park” turns 50
“Star Trek” in the Park

O is for Our Town

I should note that I was in a production of Our Town, some 25 years ago. I played the drunken choir director Simon Stimson, one of the characters in the cemetery in the third act.

How did a play written 72 years ago about a small town in New Hampshire, with no scenery and few props, “transcend the ages to become America’s most produced play”? Maybe it’s because it contains some universal themes.

From SparkNotes.com:
[Thorton] Wilder’s principal message in Our Town — that people should appreciate the details and interactions of everyday life while they live them — became critical…when the play hit theaters in 1938. It was a time of tremendous international tension, and citizens across the globe suffered from fear and uncertainty. Our Town directed attention away from these negative aspects of life…and focused instead on the aspects of the human experience that make life precious. Wilder revealed his faith in the stability and constancy of life through his depiction and discussion of the small town of Grover’s Corners, with its “marrying . . . living and . . . dying.”

Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager

Specifically, the dying. Act 1 is the ordinary, even mundane lives of the townspeople. Act 2 addresses the budding romance of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Act 3 is in a cemetery but has a flashback to a time about a decade in the past. This prompts a character to ask of the Stage Manager, the narrator: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” And, of course, the answer is “No”. But how could we?

There have been 4000 productions in the last decade according to this CBS News video, which shows segments of a recent long-running Off-Broadway production that closed only last month. One of the participants noted that if we realize life while we live it, every minute, we’d probably be on Twitter, tweeting 24/7, which would puncture the value of actually EXPERIENCING life.

The 2010 NYC off-Broadway production’s George and Emily

While there was a 1940 movie, the play has always been the thing. According to Wikipedia, there was a live musical 1955 TV adaptation starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George, and Eva Marie Saint as Emily. I remember watching the 1977 TV adaptation of the play starring Hal Holbrook, Robby Benson, and Glynnis O’Connor, though not the 1989 telecast with Spalding Gray, Frances Conroy, Penelope Ann Miller, and Eric Stoltz. And I HAD to view the adaptation of a 2002 Broadway revival starring Paul Newman, this time as the Stage Manager, a segment that can be seen here.

I should note that I was in a production of Our Town, some 25 years ago, produced by the FOCUS Churches of Albany. I played the drunken choir director Simon Stimson, one of the characters in the cemetery in the third act, who bitterly proclaims: “That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.” Even in death, Simon seemed to miss the point.

Wilder was full of pithy sayings beyond the realm of this play. Perhaps my favorite: “If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 7