The Year in Gay Theater

Is the Star Out Tonight?
The Little Dog Laughed, all about a closeted movie star who falls in love with a sweet-natured hustler, seemed promising but flawed when it opened at Second Stage in January 2006. Author Douglas Carter Beane did some reworking for the Broadway production, which bowed in November of that year and ran only through mid-February of this year. His canny rewrites, plus the inspired casting of Tom Everett Scott as the movie star, resulted in an entertaining yet thought-provoking play that was sparked by Julie White's Tony Award-winning performance as a relentless agent.

And the Award for the Most Memorable Male Nude Scene Goes To...
Ian McKellen, who stripped to reveal that he was every inch a king in the RSC production of King Lear at BAM. Runner-Up: Johnny Galecki, who jumped out of bed naked when discovered in an intimate moment with Tom Everett Scott in The Little Dog Laughed. Honorable Mention: Steve Blanchard, for the Off-Broadway musical Frankenstein. Though Blanchard is not completely nude as he stalks about the stage in his role of the Creature, his shirt is wide open in every scene, and the muscular development he displays is so impressive that it was mentioned in almost every review.

If You Show All of It, They Will Come
According to various reports, the most popular productions in the New York International Fringe Festival, the Midtown International Theatre Festival, and the New York Musical Theatre Festival were those that featured male nudity and/or gay content. Go figure…

A Disappointing Gay Scene in an Otherwise Great Musical
Adapted by composer Duncan Sheik and lyricist-librettist Steven Sater from Frank Wedekind's groundbreaking late 19^th-century drama, the Tony Award winning musical Spring Awakening is a beautiful thing overall and fully deserving of its success. But the show stumbles in its one explicitly gay scene: the seduction of a teenage boy by one of his schoolmates, which is played broadly for laughs in a way that cheapens the moment. Would that director Michael Mayer had made another choice.

General Excellence Award to Off-Broadway Theater for Serious Treatment of Gay Themes and Subject Matter
Stephen Karam's Speech and Debate is about a gay sex scandal in a high school, set against the background of another scandal involving the town's conservative Republican mayor. Among the characters in Kate Fodor's 100 Saints You Should Know were a priest and a teenager both struggling with being gay – but, refreshingly, the plot had nothing to do with sexual molestation. That hot-button issue was tackled by Neil LaBute in his flawed but gripping play In a Dark Dark House.

Terrence McNally's Some Men, an examination of gay relationships through the decades before and after Stonewall, was also flawed but can still be rated as its author's best work in years. In Christopher Shinn's Dying City, Pablo Schreiber played twins, one of whom was gay. Clint Jeffries' The Jocker was a moving drama of the dynamic among a band of hobos during the Great Depression. And Delaney Britt Brewer's An Octopus Love Story was a wonderful, bittersweet comedy about a gay man who weds a lesbian in order to protest the ban on gay marriage.