Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (May 30, 2008)

Astonishingly, this same friend had never heard of Mario Lopez. When I explained, using terms like “gay icon,” Nip/Tuck, and “shower,” emphasizing my admiration for Mario’s stunning physique and, oh, yeah, his acting chops, my friend made an interesting observation: as much as I might be looking forward to seeing Mario’s pecs and biceps on stage, our standards of male beauty and the male body have changed significantly from the 1970s setting of the show.

As much as Mario just ruled that Broadway stage (seriously, he was quite good), there was a strange tension between the revival’s reverential attempt to recreate the show’s original 1978 staging right down to each period-appropriate leotard, and the ultra-modern physiques of its cast members. We live in an age of diploma-carrying personal trainers and scientifically-engineered gym equipment, in which meticulously crafted workout routines render bodies into the solar-flexed, six-packed, sculpted perfection of Greek statues — which are often just as lifeless and interchangeable.

A Chorus Line, 2008

Just how differently male bodies appeared on stage in the 1970s was made clear to me when I recently watched the DVD of Liza with a Z, Liza Minelli’s Emmy award-winning 1972 television special. I’m not a huge Liza fan, but this is truly must-see viewing for anyone with a fondness for over-the-top variety show cheese not seen since the days of Sonny & Cher, Donny and Marie, and Pink Lady and Jeff.

The male dancers who typically frame Liza throughout the special, while in no means out of shape, don’t have anywhere near the same chiseled bodies we’ve come to expect in 2008. More shockingly, they even have facial and body hair. Truth be told, they look in many ways like average guys who just strolled in off the street and somehow wound up on stage. And yet that only makes it somehow more sexy when they subsequently undulate their bodies into Bob Fosse’s choreographed poses.

I can’t help but think that in now holding the male body to the same standard of physical perfection we do women in the public eye, we’re missing out on something. Of course, I’m not going to complain about the sight of a Mario Lopez in all his muscled glory dancing away or dropping a towel in front of me. I just wish he could be joined every so often by guys who look more like this:

Passing Strange stars and features music by the singer/songwriter Stew and his longtime musical partner Heidi Rodewald of the pop-rock group The Negro Problem. Although not gay, Stew is certainly gay-friendly having been named one of Out magazine’s Out 100: The Men and Women Who Made 2007 a Year to Remember.

Daniel Breaker (left) & Stew in Passing Strange

The show, in a style more akin to an indie rock concert than a traditional musical, depicts Stew on stage narrating semi-autobiographical events enacted before him and the audience by an alter-ego known only as “Youth,” played by the Tony-nominated Daniel Breaker. To discover himself as a musician, Youth leaves his California middle-class home for Amsterdam and Berlin. Once there, his racial identity is perceived of in varying ways depending on how willingly he “passes” himself off as something other than he truly is. In Berlin, for example, he consciously plays the role of angry young black man from the L.A. projects, even though, as the adult Stew wryly reveals to the audience, he had no idea what life was like “hustling for dimes on the mean streets of South Central.”