For decades, describing a boy or a man as “artistic” was a way to imply they did not fit the accepted heterosexual mold. Of course the expression’s double meaning could be literal, as illustrated by recent coming-of-age shows in which the narrators are both gay and, well, artistic. (As for lesbians, they have long been called “handy” — bring on the tool belts.)
Douglas Lyons and Ethan D. Pakchar’s “Beau the Musical” follows many of the conventional signposts of the “growing up different” genre. As a 27-year-old, Ace (Matt Rodin) revisits his middle and then high school years, when he navigated an affair with his bully, Ferris (Cory Jeacoma); figured out how to better understand his mother, Raven (Amelia Cormack); and reconnected with a once-estranged grandfather, Beau (Chris Blisset), who had secrets of his own.
Josh Rhodes’s production for Out of the Box Theatrics, through July 27 at Theater 154 in Manhattan, goes how you’d expect a story involving same-sex attraction in Tennessee to go: clandestine trysts, self-loathing, violent encounters, art (in this case music) as an outlet and escape. This is well-trod terrain, but Lyons has a flair for recycling tropes, as he did in his popular comedy “Chicken and Biscuits.” And Rodin, who played a gay teacher in the musical “All the World’s a Stage” this spring, gives a warm portrayal of someone trying to find his place through music-making.
The bulk of “Beau the Musical” takes place over the late 1990s and early 2000s, while Rob Madge’s autobiographical “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” largely looks back at events from the 2000s and 2010s, when Madge, who identifies as nonbinary, was growing up. The shows’ time frames overlap somewhat, but the experiences they depict are starkly different.
A British production that had a five-performance run at New York City Center in June, “My Son’s a Queer” is a portrait of a child who was unconditionally loved and accepted, even when bossing their father around in a D.I.Y. Disney tribute — which we see because the Madges were fond of making home videos. Everybody in the family supported young Rob’s artistic-ness, both literal and euphemistic: Granny Grimble made them a Maleficent costume, and when problems erupted at school (“not the best of times,” the adult Rob says in a rare display of understatement), their mother took a job as a “lunch lady” to keep watch.
Madge revisits those years with unflagging, if solipsistic, brightness — the young Rob often asks their parents, “Are you filming?” and a robust ego seems to have been a constant. The downside is that the City Center performance I saw did not always bear out Madge’s confidence in their talent, with performances of original songs (written with Pippa Cleary) that rarely rose above adequate.
The confluence of artistic and “artistic” was also at the center of “The Queerest Night on Broadway!,” which recounts the scandals that surrounded the Mae West plays “Sex” and “Pleasure Man” in the late 1920s. “Pleasure Man,” which ended with a lengthy drag ball, was deemed to be indecent by the police, and the first Broadway performance, on Oct. 1, 1928, ended with all the cast members — many of them gay or gender-non-conforming — in jail.
This was the first show in Hunter Bird and Mason Alexander Park’s series “The Pansy Craze,” which explored “the raucous queer history your textbooks left out.” Presented by Audible and Rachel Brosnahan’s Scrap Paper Pictures at the Minetta Lane Theater, the series also featured shows about 1930s cabaret life and the rise of glam rock in the ’70s last month. (The remaining three episodes are coming in November.)
Park, who portrays Desire in the Netflix series “The Sandman,” hosted “The Queerest Night on Broadway!” along with the egregiously undermic’ed and underutilized sidekick, Lachlan Watson, and a guest star, Jackie Cox. It was a startling demonstration in how to take a vivid subject, turn it into an overlong hybrid of TED Talk and Wikipedia, and siphon all the fun out of it. And despite getting bogged in repetitious minutiae, the show didn’t mention that five years before “Pleasure Man” was shut down, Broadway was rocked by a similar scandal involving “God of Vengeance” and its lesbian scenes (an event that inspired Paula Vogel’s brilliant play “Indecent”).
The verbose script romanticized the lives of queer people with ahistoric interpretations that felt framed by 21st-century minds on the lookout for glimmers of positivity and representation, mistaking spots of underground resistance, as proud and brave as they were, for general acceptance.
“For a brief moment, gender nonconformity wasn’t just tolerated,” Park says of that era in New York City, “it was celebrated!” This must have come as news to the American establishment and particularly to the police, who much preferred “artistic folks” to remain in quotation marks and, if necessary, jail.
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