The Year in Gay Theater

Shades of Grey
The film Grey Gardens has a cult following among many gay men, and so did the musical based on the movie. Aside from the Tony Award winning performances of Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson as the eccentric Edith Bouvier Beale and her aged mother, the show featured a stylish turn by Bob Stillman as George Gould Strong, a character who might have amounted to nothing more than a gay cliché in other hands. Icing on the cake: Heartthrob Matt Cavenaugh played Jerry, the Beale women's repairman and friend, who turned out to be gay in real life.

Busch is Back
One of the few positive effects of the stagehands’ strike was that some theatergoers who held unusable tickets to big Broadway blockbusters opted instead to see Off-Broadway shows they wouldn't otherwise have sought out. Word is that Die Mommie Die!, Charles Busch's outrageous camp-fest at New World Stages, benefited greatly in this regard. Busch gives a sublime performance as washed-up actress/singer Angela Arden, and soap opera star Van Hansis is quite the hottie as Angela's troubled son. All of this plus Bush's to-die-for costumes, designed by Michael Bottari and Ronald Case, makes for a wildly entertaining show.

Heart and Music
William Finn is not the most consistent musical theater composer/lyricist at work today, but when he's good, he's excellent. For evidence, get thee to Make Me a Song, a revue that's now playing at New World Stages — just steps away from Die Mommie Die! Included is a condensed version of Finn's best show, the very gay Falsettos, along with selections from his other, lesser-known musicals.

How Rude!

Spoofmeister Gerard Alessandrini's Forbidden Broadway appeals to everyone, as evidenced by the fact that this hysterically funny revue has been running almost continuously for more than 25 years. But FB gets much of its comic edge from its underlying gay sensibility. For example, a number sung to the tune of “June is Bustin' Out All Over” contains the following lyrics: “Soon the season will be over / This year, the sexy Cubans rate / With their little tails a swishin' / Every chorus boy is wishin' / He could take Raúl Esparza on a date / (But I hear he's married.)” Then there's this, sung to the tune of “Please Don't Monkey With Broadway” by Cole Porter: "We're the Wicked flying monkeys / Out of costume, we are cute Manhattan hunkies / Who cruise / Hell's Kitchen walking in twos."

Blast From the Past

The Keen Company made the best possible case for a play that many people thought was hopelessly dated: Tea and Sympathy, Robert Anderson's fraught '50s drama about a boarding school student who is mercilessly taunted because he's perceived to be gay. Dan McCabe offered a touching performance as the boy in question.