Short Reviews
Reviews of the books Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall, Secrets and Strangers, and A Long Day’s Evening, the play My Big Gay Italian Wedding, and the album “The Beatles” by AG.
MoreBrowsing: Theatre
Blog Posts
New Plays Revisit the Bad Old Days
DAVID AUBURN’S new play, The Columnist, is a stroll down memory lane for many of us of a certain age. … [and] End of the Rainbow … is a play with music rather than a musical. It marks the Broadway debut of Tracie Bennett, who inhabits the role of Judy Garland as she struggled with the addiction to pills and alcohol that would soon be her undoing.
MoreGBF Looking for Love
THE FILM PARIAH is all about Alike (pronounced ah-lee-kay), a seventeen-year-old black girl who happens to be lesbian. Alike is smart yet naïve, confident, and hesitant about revealing her true self—not that she herself ever questions who she is. …
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Love and Marriage in Two NYC Debuts
Two plays: Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays and Friends and Relations
MoreCooked Down to Nothing
… Schanke (whose previous subjects include Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne) has used Cal’s plays, journals, and letters, plus the interviews he conducted with Cal’s friends, and put them together in unobtrusive, readable prose-and got it right. This book is not just about gay theatre and gay liberation, but also about gay childhood in the small-town South and gay adulthood in cities at a time when liberation turned to horror. …
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What Becomes of the Broken Spirited
BY IT’S VERY TITLE- The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures-we know that Tony Kushner, wunderkind extraordinaire, is presenting a play dense with ideas and extravagant language. Kushner does not shy away from these charges, which have also been applied to his outsize masterpiece Angels in America.
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Two Plays Ponder a Half-Century’s Change
PART OF a spate of gay-themed plays on the boards in New York this season, two from Off-Broadway present contrasting approaches to the recent history of same-sex male love. The Temperamentals by Jon Marans dramatizes early activism: the creation in Los Angeles of the Mattachine Society by Communist organizer Harry Hay and his then lover, costume designer Rudi Gernreich, and a small circle of friends. The story unfolds in the early 1950’s with America moving from the war years into the McCarthy Era. The Pride, on the other hand, a first play by Alexi Kaye Campbell, is a British import that views the gay present through the lens of the past. It features two different male couples in London in 1958 and 2008; each pair must come to terms with the personal price of gay relations. In 1958, the context is one of social repression; in 2008, one of sexual and social liberation.
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On Broadway
ONE THING that becomes entirely clear as you read Herbert Keyser’s latest book, Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre: The Composers and Lyricists, is that the author is a font of knowledge about song on stage. As his bio tells us, the book is based on the lectures Keyser delivers to passengers on cruise ships. Even if the author is conspicuously heterosexual (his bio lists a loving wife, six children, and ten grandchildren), there’s something innately gay about a book on the topic of musical theatre.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of Truman Capote? Enfant Terrible, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage, and Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox.
MoreDomestication and Its Discontents
THE IDEA that madness brings you closer to God and to the creative spirit seems a holdover from the 1970’s, arguably our last “romantic” era. Today, the idea and the era are both quite dead. I’m reminded of this fact by the current revival of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which pits Apollonian and Dionysian forces against each other
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