There are a dozen shows currently running on Broadway with LGBTQ content and characters, more than at any time since I started this annual census. But the number alone doesn’t get at how gay the Great Bright Way has suddenly become. The cast of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” has been chosen to lead the NYC Pride March on June 28, the culminating event during Pride Month honoring the 1969 Stonewall Riots that gave birth to the modern gay rights movement. And this reimagined Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is just one of the four (arguably five) current Broadway productions that are completely and iconically Queer. They strike me as much acts of resistance against the increasing hostility in the country as a momentary escape from it
Below is a description of what’s LGBTQ+ in (or about) these shows, listed alphabetically.
May (currently portrayed by Michael Ivan Carrier), who lives outside gender binary labels, launches into Britney Spears’ hit “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman,” which of course was about her age; May makes it about gender transition. May and Francois (Nathan Levy) sing the Katy Perry hit “I Kissed a Girl” with rewritten lyrics,
Afterward, they sing the NSYNC hit “It’s Going to Be Me” (pronounced May)
The ten affluent neighbors who inhabit David Lindsay-Abaire’s comedy (which unfortunately is closing tomorrow) form a recognizable cross-section of liberal New Yorkers (although the city in which they dwell is not explicitly identified.) Two of those ten are gay, which is an intrinsic part of their identity, and figures in two small plot twists, but is just one aspect of who they are. Melissa Han (Jeena Yi) is a lawyer, Asian-American, vice-president of the Neighborhood Association. Brooks Duncan (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) is African American, a travel writer and married with a kid. That their sexual orientation is so matter-of-fact may be in its own way groundbreaking.
The show’s musical number “Turn It Off” seems a clear allusion to being in the closet; one tip-off is that the chorus boys performing the number are wearing red-sequined satin vests.
Every single character in this reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical has been recast as a member of the queer community of color involved in the Harlem Ballroom scene. The performers themselves are explicitly, sometimes famously, queer, including Junior LaBeija, one of the actual emcees from the ball scene, featured in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.
The new play, like the 1975 movie starring Al Pacino, is based on the 1972 true story of a gay Vietnam veteran (Sonny, here portrayed by Jon Bernthal) who attempts to rob a bank in order to fund the gender-affirming surgery of his trans girlfriend (Leon, portrayed by Esteban Andres Cruz.) Resurrecting this story now feels dated and poorly timed, but the production does make an effort to update the original at-best ambivalent attitudes. Cruz identifies as trans-nonbinary, and the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis turns Sonny into a speechifying gay rights advocate: “…To be a homosexual — okay – it ain’t a bad thing. Not at all…Who’s keeping you all alive in here? A homosexual. If ya ask me, it’s a lot harder, a lot more manly, to swim against the tide, to be true to oneself under the eyes of God above…”
In this play based on a true story of the grim imprisonment on Death Row of an innocent man, Nick (Adrien Brody) tells the surprisingly romantic story of Wesley and Butch:
“Wesley met Butch when they were children in West Philly, where Butch was a foster child. Wesley was gay. Butch said he wasn’t gay, he just loved Wesley.Butch began doing some pretty serious crime, got thrown into prison for life…Wesley went nuts without him. Butch was the only thing in his life that protected him from all the people who knew he was weak without Butch.
So, Wesley began committing deliberate crimes… just so he could get locked up with Butch. It’s still the most romantic thing I ever heard.”
That’s the prelude to the scene between Wesley (Ephraim Sykes) and Butch (Michael Cavinder) when the guards split the couple up, and Wesley rebels by breaking the rule of complete silence, singing The Temptations, I Wish it Would Rain.” And Butch replying with The Temptations,’ Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)
“To hear him sing, as his way of showing love for someone being taken from him,” Nick observes, “made me want someone to care for me in that way. The way that singing was worth it, even when singing can get your head beat in”
There are homoerotic undertones in this teen vampire musical, as there were in the original 1987 cult movie, especially between Michael (LJ Benet) and David (Ali Bourzgui.) But Michael’s younger brother Sam (Benjamin Pasek) is given a more explicit gay identity; He keeps a beefcake photo of (the 1980s) Rob Lowe on the inside door of his closet (!), and eventually gets a musical “Superpower” that more or less spells it out:
Will this secret identity
End up being the best of me?
Mom smiles but doesn’t get me
Michael can’t protect me
But maybe i can be a hero here
And make it cool to be queer
Maybe that’s my superpower
“Welcome, you gorgeous collection of reprobates and rascals, artistes and arrivistes, soubrettes and sodomites, welcome to the Moulin Rouge,” impresario Harold Zidler (currently portrayed by Eric Anderson) declares upon his entrance. If there aren’t any sodomites on stage identified as such by name, one featured character, Baby Doll (Jeigh Madjus), is explicitly a young drag queen. (In an interview shortly after the musical debuted on Broadway, Madjus said portraying the character was an adjustment: “I had to go buy heels at TJ Maxx for my audition. It’s taken me two years for me to feel comfortable dancing in heels.”)
Maya Rudolph is the tenth and current performer to portray First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln since this play began on Broadway two years ago, and most so far have even been women. But the title clues us in: “Oh, Mary” is a campy gay play. Playwright Cole Escola, the original Mary, has created a world in which Abraham Lincoln is graphically gay, albeit not out and proud. Lincoln (identified only as Mary’s Husband and currently portrayed by Phillip James Brannon, the seventh actor in the role) ogles and flirts with his handsome aide. Then he feels guilty about it, praying: “Lord. Please oh please, win me this war, Lord and keep my wife from ruining my name. Just give me those two things and I swear to you right here and now… I swear that I will never do anything homosexual ever again.”
He wins the war, and conspires to keep his wife constrained, but he doesn’t keep to his promise. There is a gay sex scene. And one of the most significant tragic events in American history is presented as the indirect result of a gay lover’s spat.
“I’m just a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,” Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Luke Evans) sings by way of introduction, Transsexual being his planet, and Transylvania being the galaxy. If the language has changed somewhat since the musical’s 1973 debut, theatergoers can feel both current and nostalgic appeal in the story of the sexual liberation of the wholesome couple Brad and Janet by a group of nonconforming aliens. (As with Dog Day Afternoon, one of the trans characters in this revival is portrayed by a trans actress.) The show also meets a sizable beefcake quotient not just with the bare-chested Rocky (Josh Rivera) but with the pair of muscle men who portray aliens with outfits like Vegas showgirls and giant eyeballs in place of their heads.
One need not be gay to be a show queen, but there is a certain gay sensibility in this musical that is both parody and pastiche of the Broadway musicals from the Golden Age. It’s generally accepted that many such musicals were put together by closeted gay men (eg Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Moss Hart) and “gay-coded.”
“Schmigadoon” has fun with this understanding, bringing the subtext to the surface most prominently in a gay romantic subplot involving the town’s mayor (Brad Oscar) and pastor (Maulik Pancholy.) Both characters have playfully suggestive names, the pastor somewhat subtly as the Rev. Layton, the mayor not at all subtly as Mayor Menlove. Eventually, Mayor Menlove gets even more explicit, when he bursts into song:
I’m a homosexual
It’s no longer subtextual
I’m attracted to men
Right before the final song, “My Heart Will Go On,” Marla Mindelle tells the audience to sing along. “And I’m sure some of you here know the words, because let’s face it, most of you here tonight, are gay.” Maybe there is something in this super-campy mashup of Céline Dion songs with a jokey replay of the movie “Titanic” that isn’t gay. But the trio who created it, Mindelle has said, “are inherently queer, and gay, and extra.” And check out Jim Parsons, out gay star, in the drag role of the evil would-be mother-in-law Ruth, or the self-declared “raging homosexual” Layton Williams as The Iceberg, leading the cast in “River Deep, Mountain High” in mirrored silver dress and icy blue wig? And what about the unsubtle hints about Cal (John Riddle), Rose’s official fiancé? He asks the captain to speed up the arrival of ship on shore a day earlier, because “I’ve got a hair appointment in Soho. They book WAY out.”
