John Clum's Theater, Music, Film and Media Reviews

At the center of the musical version of John Berendt’s saga of life in Savannah is a killing. Middle-aged antiques dealer Jim Williams is accused of shooting Danny Hansford, a bit of rough trade who, shall we say, has both a day and a night job with Williams.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is far from the first musical about an alleged or convicted murderer. Roxie Hart in Chicago took care of her boyfriend; Velma Kelly her cheating husband. They were acquitted. Let’s not forget Sweeney Todd who pays for his crimes. Chicagois one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. Sweeney Todd is revived regularly. Why doesn’t Midnight in the Garden of Evil work? One reason is that the writing and performances don’t make us root for Jim Williams and Danny Hansford. They are basically unpleasant people who need some likability. The wonderful perversion of Chicago and Sweeney Todd is that the audience ends up on the side of the killers. In Tom Hewitt’s performance, Jim Williams doesn’t have the old Southern charm the character needs, particularly when he has half a dozen songs to sing. His singing, by the way, is far from effortless. Jim Williams is just plain nasty to Danny, but nothing in Austin Colby’s performance or Taylor Mac’s writing for Danny makes the audience care about him. He’s just a nasty piece of business. Hewitt, who is in his mid-60s, is a decade or two too old for the part. Should Jim be old enough to be Danny’s grandfather? If we don’t care about either man, the issue of whether or not Jim is guilty of Danny’s death doesn’t seem very important.

As a result, the success of the show hangs on J. Harrison Ghee’s fabulous performance as Lady Chablis. Ghee has star written all over him/her/them. They have the charisma and charm a big musical needs. The show comes to life every time Ghee is onstage. Alas, Lady Chablis’s story has nothing to do with the main plot.   

The most gaping hole in the show is the forgettable score by Jason Robert Brown. Brown has written a couple of the best scores of the past thirty years. Parade is a classic and Brown’s score to The Bridges of Madison County (yes, the musical!) is one of my favorites. Neither show was a hit on its first outing, and Brown has a strange reputation of writing decent scores for weak shows (Honeymoon in Vegas, Mister Saturday Night, Urban Cowboy). This is not one of Brown’s stronger scores. His cleverest lyrics are for Jim Williams, but even there the lyrics need to help make us root for the man. They don’t.

Veteran Sierra Boggess does all she can with the chief society lady, Emma Dawes, but she and the ladies outstay their welcome. One song from them would be enough. Boggess is a real trouper, but there is almost an air of desperation in her efforts to put across weak material. She’s had worse to work with–she was the lead in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s disastrous sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies.

Taylor Mac has tried to weave together all the key threads of John Berendt’s book. He tries to parallel Jim William’s rise and fall and rise to that of Lady Chablis. They are both performers in their way—the self-made piss-elegant Southern queen and the drag queen who is, to quote La Cage aux Folles, her “own special creation.” Neither is ever going to fully belong. If the show is going to go anywhere after Chicago, the parallels have to be drawn more vividly. The song “Restoration” midway through the second act starts to do that, but we should see the kinship between these characters more clearly from the beginning. And the performer playing Jim needs to be as fabulous in his way as Lady Chablis is. Only then will the show take off. 

The problem may be in Rob Ashford’s direction. From the outset, he plays up the voodoo and racial history of Savannah, but they aren’t what the show is about. The show is about two queer folk trying to survive in their segments of Charleston society. That should have been his focus from the moment the show starts.

All the other aspects of the show—Christopher Oram’s skeletal sets, Toni-Leslie James’s costumes, and Neil Austin and Jamie Platt’s lighting were fine. The choreography (Tanya Birl-Torres) is as blah as the score.

Seeing a new musical in Chicago is always exciting. We in the audience speculate on the show’s future. If the necessity corrections in writing, composing and casting were made, would a show like this succeed in the current Broadway lineup of glitzy jukebox musicals. Would current Broadway audiences shell out the current outrageous prices to see a musical about a gay man who kills his young sociopathic lover? The top-grossing shows on Broadway last week were still family fare—The Lion King and Wicked. I wouldn’t invest in this one.

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD, now having a sold out run at Steppenwolf, is a quintessential Samuel D. Hunter play. Like most of his work, the ninety-minute play is set in Hunter’s native state of Idaho and features characters who are in physical, psychological, and spiritual stasis. They yearn to connect with other people but can’t make the leap from self-absorption to familial or romantic love. As usual, there is a lost, gay character whose psychic wounds are not easily healed.

The lost gay character in LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is thirty-something Ethan (Micah Stock), a writer whose writing block is a symptom of his inability to make positive choices and move forward. Ethan’s favorite phrase when forced to make a decision is “I don’t know.” The only positive decision he has made is to leave his affluent, super-controlling partner. When we meet Ethan, he has returned to the small Idaho town in which he was raised to sell his father’s house. Ethan has no positive feelings about his neglectful drug-addict father. He has come to his reclusive aunt’s house to find the deed to his father’s house. Aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) is a bristly woman who loved her career as a nurse, but now faces being an invalid herself. Like everything else in her life, Sarah wants to deal with her cancer alone on her own terms.

Sarah invites Ethan to stay with her for a few days. Unable to decide what to do next, Ethan is still there a year later. In the meantime, he has met and become somewhat attached to James (John Drea), a sweet graduate student in astro-physics at the university. Ethan and James met on a hookup app, but from the outset, James seeks a relationship, not just sex. I must admit that the one nagging question I have about the play is why James would be drawn to someone as emotionally damaged as Ethan. I kept wanting to yell out to James, “Run!” Ethan is all resentment: at his father for not taking care of him, at his aunt for not being willing to rescue him from his father, at his former lover for not trusting him, and at anyone who does not share his financial problems. James is connected to the world. In one lovely scene, he tries to introduce Ethan to the wonders of the night sky. Still, James is more a character foil than a fully drawn character.

Sam Hunter’s gift is making us care about deeply flawed, deeply wounded characters like Ethan. Perhaps his only hope is to become as self-sufficient as his Aunt Sarah, but she, like many of us, reaches a point where she cannot function alone. Ethan seems incapable of looking forward. Perhaps there might be healing in looking backward creatively through his writing.

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is, like many of Hunter’s plays, an absorbing character study. It is one of Hunter’s minimalist plays. His last and possibly his best play so far, A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, required two fine actors and two chairs. LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is performed with only a recliner sofa. With the help of director Joe Mantello, the script and fine actors do all the work. Laurie Metcalf is a specialist in playing spiky characters. She allows us to understand that there is vulnerability under the hard, protective shell. Micah Stock has the more challenging role. Like many of Hunter’s characters, Ethan is a mess, but Stock makes the audience feel his pain. John Drea makes James a bit too passive, but the problem is in the writing. Loving Ethan would be a challenge. I’d like to know more about why James takes it on. Or are we to see him as one of those people who want to be settled in a relationship—any relationship? Are there no other gay men in Moscow, Idaho? James needs a bit more detail before the play goes to New York.

A minor quibble. Hunter’s titles usually hint at something about the play. LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD gives us a location that doesn’t seem relevant.

Nonetheless, LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is a lovely, bittersweet play, an excellent capstone to a particularly strong (with one exception) Steppenwolf season. Any theatre that can give us Brandon Jacob-Jenkins’ PURPOSE followed by LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD, is to be celebrated. We’ll forgive them the amateurish, stupid POTUS. If only next season looked as promising.

Like many historical television series and films, the STARZ series Mary and George trades historical accuracy for sensationalism; but with Julianne Moore and the beautiful, talented Nicholas Galitzine in the titles roles and Tony Curran offering a volatile, fickle, dissolute version of King James I, it is great fun, soap opera on steroids.

                  The basic facts of the series are true. Mary Villiers, a minor aristocrat with ambition that rivals Lady Macbeth’s, knew that for her to have any power, she had to get it through the men in her family. She found money to send her beautiful son George to France to learn courtly skills, then plotted to get him in front of King James so that he might become the King’s favorite. James, who seems to have been bisexual or homosexual obviously was smitten with George, whom he made Duke of Buckingham and Lord High Admiral. George, his mother and his half-brothers greatly benefitted financially from his power. When James died in 1625 and was replaced by his son, Charles I, George stayed in power until he was murdered in 1628. The upstart, ruthless Villiers always had a lot of enemies and were not popular with the public.

                  The real King James was a complex person. His upbringing was turbulent. His father was murdered and his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was removed from the Scottish throne shortly after James was born. We know what happened to her. James became King  of Scotland when he was thirteen months old.  During his childhood, the country was actually ruled and he was raised by a series of noblemen. He was quite a scholar and wrote important books from an early age and commissioned the great translation of the Bible that bears his name. He had prudent ideas about foreign policy and was eager to unite England, Scotland and Ireland. James believed (even wrote a book on) the divine right of kings. Unfortunately, he had terrible relations with parliament, which he regularly dissolved. He loved hunting and elaborate entertainments, which strained the treasury of the realm.

                  His reign gave us some of the greatest literature England has produced. He was the patron of Shakespeare’s company from 1603. Ben Jonson wrote the texts for some of James’s court entertainments. John Donne was in his prime.  

                  The James of the series is a totally dissolute hedonist who spend most of his time in the company of semi-clad or unclad young men. Once in a while, he shows flashes of Machiavellian guile, but usually takes the advice of his male lovers, whom he elevates to positions of great power. Tony Curran manages to create a mercuric, unpredictable, totally selfish James, sort of a gay 17^th century Donald Trump. 

                  George, dependent on his mother’s guile and advice, is not as savvy as the historical George. In the series, he is a pretty boy out of his depth. This is because the writers have put the focus on Mary who ruthlessly rises through her sons. Mary’s sidekick, lover, and lady in waiting is a prostitute with a taste for homicide (no historical basis for that). Julianne Moore, star and Executive Producer, obviously is having a ball playing this monster whose ambition has no limits. She clearly thinks she is smarter than the men around her but must use them because women have no property or power. George both hates her and needs her. Nicholas Galitzine shows us a young man desperate to be independent of his mother, but not quite ruthless enough to survive on his own.  Essentially, he is placed in the position of women: his power depends on his sexual power over the King. 

                  Some of the moments in the series that seem most outlandish really happened. Mary did lock her son up overnight with Katherine so that her reputation would be so sullied that she would have to marry him even though her parents disapproved. George who has up to now been interested only in men, develops a close relationship with his clever wife.

                  There are a variety of murders that remind the viewer of all the murders in the plays of King James’s time. There are also lots of semi-clad and unclad bodies romping around. Sex and violence—what more can one ask from a slice of history?

                  Luca Guadagnino’s film, CHALLENGERS, is about two games: tennis and a three-sided love triangle that feeds the athletic and the sexual competition.

                  Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have been inseparable best friends since tennis school. At a junior tournament, they meet the beautiful and fiercely competitive Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Tashi becomes for them another competition. When she comes to their hotel room, she senses that the two boys are closer than they want to admit. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” she says. The result is a three-way kissing session in which the two boys end up kissing each other. Tashi tells them that she will accept the phone number of the boy who wins the game the next day. Patrick wins the game and Tashi—temporarily. After a nasty fight with Patrick, Tashi loses concentration in a game and injures her knee. Her way of staying in the game she loves is to coach Art, who becomes her husband and the father of her child.

                  Years later, Art is trying to get his Mojo back after an injury. Tashi has entered him in a small tournament in suburban New Rochelle, unaware that Patrick has also signed up for the tournament. Art only stays in the game because it means so much to Tashi, who quietly resents the fact that he isn’t as devoted to the game as she is. She also still has a turbulent occasional fling with Patrick, though she claims to despise him. 

                  All this has the makings of soap opera, but the three leads are so good and have such chemistry together that the eroticism sizzles. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist sweat a lot, first in a scene in a sauna when Patrick tries both to reconcile with Art, from whom he has been estranged, as well as unnerve him before their big match; and, later, on the court when the camera closes in on their sweaty bodies. Tennis is as erotic in this film as the relationships between the three leads. At the end, we see the two men in a sweaty tennis court embrace as Tashi looks on cheering. She knows that the men need each other as competitors to play their best game and that they need each other as friends. 

                  Zendaya is an amazingly beautiful woman and a superb actress. She capture’s Tashi’s fierce ambition and her disappointment in the men she loves, who cannot match her ambition. There’s a touching scene before the big match when Patrick tells her that whatever happens, he will retire at the end of the season. His worry is that she won’t love him anymore. She embraces him, but the look on her face is one of loss. It is no wonder she has sex with Art in the back seat of his car. The two men couldn’t be better. Fair Mike Faist captures Art’s sweetness and dark-haired Josh O’Connor is the quintessential sexy bad boy.

                  Watching the film, I kept thinking of the writings of Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick about the role of the woman in what Sedgwick called homosocial bonds between men. Rubin and Sedgwick wrote about literature in which women have to offer the sex between straight men that they cannot have with each other, however attracted to each other they may be. Tashi plays the men against each other for the sake of the game and because she needs to live tennis through them. 

                  I found CHALLENGERS to be totally absorbing. The only thing that put me off was Guadagnino’s tendency to kill a scene with techno music so loud that the dialogue becomes inaudible.  And it’s the same music every time!      

                  In her first conversation with Art and Patrick, Tashi talks about the match she just played. She says that it wasn’t great except for fifteen seconds of volley between her and her opponent. For Tashi that volley was like love. The final moments of the film give us Patrick and Art, thirteen years later, turning a volley into that sort of love. No wonder they end up in a fierce, joyful embrace!

                  My first exposure to an Indigenous American was The Lone Ranger on radio. The Lone Ranger’s constant companion was Tonto, who referred to the masked man as “Kemosahbee.” Did even the Lone Ranger know what the word meant? It may have been a term of endearment or an obscenity. The comradeship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto was probably taken from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, written in the 1820s to 1840s, in which the hero, Natty Bumppo has an indigenous comrade Chingachgook. 

I can’t recall the name of the film, but my childhood memories also include being terrified by an Indian raid in some black and white epic. As was often the case, some nice white family was slaughtered and their home burnt down. Later I saw all the John Ford epics of battles between John Wayne and indigenous Americans. The Searchers, considered Ford’s greatest film turned the tables and presented Wayne as a fierce racist obsessed with revenge on an Indian tribe. Wayne’s Ethan Edwards saw his adversaries as sexual predators on white women. He was intent on killing his niece whose blood and maidenhood had been sullied by indigenous men. By the 1970s, films were turning the tables on the old tropes and presenting the American Indians as the good guys and the white guys as the enemy.

While most of the cinematic American Indians of the studio era were played by white men in redface, Tonto on the long-running television version of The Lone Ranger was played by an American Indian (well, actually, a Canadian Indian), Jay Silverheels (actual name, Harold Smith). Until recently there has been a shortage of American Indian actors because there have been few roles for them on screen and, even more so, on stage. Series like the excellent Dark Winds, created from Tony Hillerman novels, now use only indigenous actors. It would be as politically incorrect for a white actor to play an indigenous American as to play a Black or Asian person. 

Which brings us to the hilarious The Thanksgiving Play, now at Steppenwolf. Our history books tell us that the early settlers in Massachusetts had a feast of Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag tribe after the indigenous people provided food to the settlers during their first Winter in New England. In Larissa Fasthorse’s version, three small-town theatre folk and a Hollywood actress try to devise a politically correct drama of the first Thanksgiving to be presented to elementary school students and their parents. Logan, the director (Audrey Francis), is one of those serious theatre people who find themselves trapped in a situation unworthy of their talents (a public elementary school). Her fifth grade production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Comethled to a petition from parents to have her fired (I feel that way about professional productions of O’Neill’s overlong play). The Thanksgiving play will be her one chance at redemption. Her leading actor is her boyfriend Jaxton (Nate Santana), a local street performer and Yoga devotee who anguishes over being politically correct. They are joined by Caden (Tim Hopper), an elementary school teacher who is an aspiring playwright. Thanks to a grant, Logan has hired an American Indian actress, Alicia, based on a headshot of Alicia in Indian garb. Alicia turns out not to be indigenous, leaving Logan with the horror of an all-white troupe.

The Thanksgiving Play is a two-pronged satire. On one hand, it is a satire of political correctness gone awry, an indigenous version of the kind of white liberal P.C. inanity so brilliantly depicted in the recent film American Fiction. On the other hand, it is a comedy about the creation of theatre and a politically savvy farce—a contemporary version of classics like Noises Off, which will be revived at Steppenwolf next season. Though the focus is not always clear, The Thanksgiving Play is consistently funny, an antidote to the idiotic mess, Potus, that Steppenwolf served up a few months ago. 

The trick of farce is that the actors have to play their parts as seriously as they would in more serious fare. The humor in farce is that the characters often take themselves far too seriously. Under Jess McLeod’s direction, the four actors kept their absurd characters credible. As usual in farce events get crazier and more physical. 

Nothing is funnier or potentially more dangerous than extreme earnestness. The Thanksgiving Play is great medicine for our crazy times.

One of the fascinating aspects of jazz composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s relatively new career as an opera composer is that he has chosen to compose works that focus on the lives of real gay and bisexual men. Fire Shut Up in My Bones (libretto by Kasi Lemmons), based on Charles Blow’s memoir, is the story of the coming of age of a bisexual man. Champion (libretto by Michael Cristofer), is a candid and powerful depiction of the tragic life of queer boxer, Emile Griffiths, complete with scenes set in pre-Stonewall gay bars (‘Down the street with no name through the door with no sign”). 

 Before I review the brilliant production of Champion that was recently mounted by the Lyric Opera of Chicago (a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera), I want to place the work in the context of American gay opera, particular recent operas that represent queer heroes and martyrs. These very different works dramatically and musically feature historical figures whose lives either represent enforcement of or defiance of heterosexual masculine hegemony. In all of these works the librettist is given equal billing with the composer. I’m not a musicologist, but a theater person who has directed operas professionally and written libretti for operas., so I feel more comfortable focusing on the words more than the music.

In a previous entry, I discussed Fellow Travelers miniseries and as a fine opera written by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Fred Pierce. Here I want to place Champion in the context of another important previous work, the groundbreaking Harvey Milk by Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie. Champion and Harvey Milk are not the only operas that are based on real gay figures. Jorge Martin’s Before Night Falls (libretto by Martin with Delores M. Koch), is based on the life and work of gay Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, and Rufus Wainwright’s opera based on the life of the Emperor Hadrian was produced at the Canadian Opera. Queer operas like these, as Alex Ross puts it, “certainly compensate for the long decades when gay people projected themselves onto an art form that failed to reflect them in return.”^[1] 

“Who are these men without wives?”^[2] fifteen-year-old Harvey Milk exclaims on his first visit to the standing room of the old Metropolitan Opera House in the first scene of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s opera, Harvey Milk. Wayne Koestenbaum has written the queerness of that location: “Two quintessentially queer sites at the opera are the line [for standing room tickets] and standing room: spaces of mobility, cruising, maximum attentiveness, spaces where one broadcasts commitment, desperation, patience; spaces where one meets other fanatics; spaces of rumor, dish, cabal.”^[3] Yet Koestenbaum was aware, even in 1993, that the opera queens who loudly responded to their beloved divas from the standing room were relics from another era: “We [contemporary gay men], consider the opera queen to be a pre-Stonewall throwback because we homophobically devalue opera as addictive behavior and as displaced eroticism. The opera queen is a dated species: very 1950s.”^[4] David Halperin observes that “gay men nowadays [2012], have a tendency to treat the Broadway musical—or Judy Garland, or Barbra Streisand, or grand opera, or any of the other cultural artifacts that supposedly encode similar forms of archaic gay male sentiment—with polite rejection, avoidance, repudiation.”^[5] In his book Opera in the Flesh, Sam Abel agrees that for closeted gay men of the past, opera was “the site for complex encodings of hidden desire. When homosexuality refuses the closet, when gay men insist on claiming our identity in public, this system breaks apart.”^[6] However, Abel finds a positive role for opera in gay culture: “Opera’s queerness, its undifferentiated sexual excess, makes it a channel for the expression of gay desire.”^[7] In Harvey Milk, the standing room at the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1945^[8] is a site of intense pleasure and transient freedom for the cheering, closeted gay men who inhabit it. 

During the performance, Harvey becomes attracted to one good-looking fellow standee and, after the performance, follows him to a gay cruising area in Central Park. Unfortunately, the young man is an undercover policeman and Harvey is placed in handcuffs. In a few minutes, we are given a picture of the life of closeted gay men before Stonewall: the exhilaration of grand opera where gay men cheer a larger-than-life diva who briefly triumphs over the brutal police followed by furtive brief sexual encounters with the concomitant threat of arrest and exposure. Young Harvey learns from his arrest that “Closets are a necessary fact of life . . . .This is the best we can hope for”(69). 

The first scene at the old Metropolitan Opera House begins with a distorted version of the opening chords of Puccini’s Tosca, representing the power of the brutal head of police, Baron Scarpia. Throughout Harvey Milk, the police and its representatives are the villains. The policeman who arrests Harvey is played by the same singer who portrays Harvey’s murderer, Dan White. Older Harvey is still handcuffed when we first see him and remains so until he accepts and celebrates his identities as Jew and gay man. In essence, accepting the closet is acquiescing to the authority of the police. The Stonewall Riots depicted at the end of Act I were acts of defiance of the police and the closet they enforced.

Although Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk centers on the life and death of gay activist Harvey Milk, the large-scale work focuses as much on the changing dynamics of the gay community from the closet of the pre-Stonewall era to an out coherent, politically active gay community. Each act ends with an elaborate ensemble—Wallace and Korie’s version of the grand concertante moments in Verdi operas—depicting a crucial moment in gay history: the Stonewall Riots, the first San Francisco Gay Pride Parade and the giant memorial march after Milk’s death. At the same time, the police and the homophobes and gay bashers they protect are omnipresent. Harvey Milk becomes a representative of the changes in gay culture as Dan White, who murdered Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, represents the homophobic opposition. 

The first act of the opera spans the years between Harvey’s introduction to opera in 1945 and the Stonewall Riots in 1969. By then, Harvey was a successful financier but still closeted. He gradually learns during the act to celebrate his two minority identities, his Judaism and his homosexuality. 

Harvey Milk begins with a Kaddish. The sounds of a shofar and snarling low brass emerge from the orchestra as a dissonant chorus, reminiscent of Penderecki and Ligeti, sing the prayer for the dead as two moments in Harvey’s life are reenacted: his murder and leaving his Long Island home for his first visit to stand at the Met. Against the Kaddish and the sampled voice of Dianne Feinstein announcing Milk’s murder, we hear Harvey’s mother voicing her fears for Harvey’s safety—“Evil is out there everywhere/. . . . Golems appear from thin air”—and her warning about “men who are different” (64). Harvey’s mother’s warning about the Golems in essence comes true but the Golems are neither supernatural nor the memories of the holocaust that haunt her: the Golems are the representatives of a virulently homophobic society. Yet she also fears the gay men who might corrupt her son. This multivalent opening is one of the most effective moments in the opera. Two moments in time merge in different representational styles: docudrama and poetic representation.

As Harvey follows the plainclothes policeman into the park, his mother remembers the holocaust and admonishes her son: “Never forget who you are”(67). She is referring to his identity as a Jew but an older Harvey understands that celebrating both his Judaism and his queerness will central to his identity. In the original production,^[8] a pink and a yellow triangle merged behind the action to create a large Star of David as Judaism and homosexuality “overlap” for Harvey. As the act ends on Christopher Street, Harvey echoes his mother, “I am just one person but I have power./I remember who I am” (73). The verb “remember” is repeated throughout the opera.  

The catalyst for Harvey’s self-realization is his relationship with Scott Smith, a young radical who becomes Harvey’s partner. They meet shortly before the Stonewall riots. The opera highlights Milk’s and Smith’s romantic relationship but actually plays down Smith’s importance as the engineer of Milk’s political campaigns. In the love scene at the mid-point of the opera, Smith echoes Harvey’s mother’s early order: “Your strength is remembering./Remember” (84). Smith wants Harvey to remember the spirit of Stonewall, the fire that heated up gay pride. The entire opera is a memorial to a crucial period in queer history.

The second act introduces Milk’s antagonist and future murderer, Dan White, a young fireman who hates what has become of his neighborhood as a result of the invasion of hippies and homosexuals. White decides to fight the forces of change by running for the Board of Supervisors. The act ends with Mayor George Moscone welcoming Milk, White and the other supervisors onto a newly diverse board. The act’s finale is a reenactment of the first San Francisco Gay Pride Parade with Harvey and Scott at the center.

  In the third act, before the murder of Milk and Mayor Moscone by Dan White, Korie and Wallace offer another moment that combines different times and places, an operatic version of cinematic cross-cutting. Harvey and Scott enter the War Memorial Opera House to the cheers of the audience. At the same time, Dan White is airing his grievances as he loads his revolver. Harvey’s mother also appears, repeating what she said the night Harvey first went to the opera, “Come right home to Woodmere when the opera is over” (97). Harvey steps forward to sing what he wishes he could tell his mother. He remembers Stonewall, the night:

…The lies we told our mothers turned to shame

And shame to rage.

And rage to pride.

And pride to hope.

And hope will never be silent. (99)

After Harvey’s death is again reenacted, the opera ends, as it began, with a Kaddish, as the mourners parade down Market Street. If the opening Kaddish was strident, the final one is peaceful, elegiac. Harvey may have been murdered but the gay community is now a vital political force. The closet doors have been broken down. 

“What Makes a Man a Man”

Champion

On the eve of the fight that will change his life, champion boxer Emile Griffith reflects on the conflict between the code of masculinity represented by the boxing ring and what he feels. He has just been taunted viciously by his opponent, Cuban boxer Benny Paret, for being a “maricon.” When he tries to talk to his manager, Howie Albert, about his feelings, Howie shuts him down: “I don’t want to know.” For Howie, men loving men is the antithesis of the masculine code of boxing. When Emile doesn’t dominate the first rounds of his fight with Paret, Howie taunts him, “What are you doing? Dancing out there?” and reminds him that boxing is a manly killer sport. In a moment of fury, Emily fires off seventeen deadly blows to Paret’s head in seventeen seconds. Emile wins the championship and Paret, already suffering from headaches from a previous fight, dies. Inevitably, years later, Emile suffers from memory loss brought on by boxing injuries. The memory loss is exacerbated by the brain injury he suffers from a brutal gay bashing.

 Terence Blanchard and Michael Christofer’s Champion offers a musical-dramatic biography of Griffiths from his childhood to his old age. Born in the Virgin Islands, he and his many illegitimate siblings are abandoned by their mother who is hungry for a better life. He is raised by an abusive aunt who for punishment makes him hold a cement block over his head for long periods of time. When he comes to New York as a young man he wants either to play baseball, a conventionally masculine vocation, or make women’s hats. Thanks to his mother, with whom he is reunited, he gets a job at a millinery business, but the owner sees his potential as a boxer. As Emile gains success as a boxer, his mother is always there to take the money and skim off some for herself. Secretly, Emile spends his nights in a gay nightclub. 

 Act I of Champion ends with the killing of Benny Paret. Act II shows us the end of his long career. It focuses on older, guilt-ridden Emile’s desire for forgiveness from Benny Paret’s now grown son. Despite his success, of because of it, Emile tries to be what the world expects him to be by entering into a doomed marriage. Later, older Emile is cared for by his loving partner and adopted son, Luis. He finally experiences real love. Even in the fog of dementia, Emile is aware of the irony of his life—“I kill a man and the world forgives me. I love a man and the world wants to kill me.?.

 During the course of the opera, Emile is played by three singers representing three stages of his life. The opera opens with old Emile in his Queens apartment, unable to remember where he put one of his shoes. Much of the opera is older Emile’s memories of his life. We see him as a young boy in the Virgin Islands and as the brash young man who leave his homeland for a career in New York. At times the three Emiles are in dialogue with each other. Old Emile watches as the young Emile lands the punches that will kill Benny Paret.

Composer Terence Blanchard has turned Emile’s story into a musically powerful grand opera complete with powerful arias and ensembles. Even the less sympathetic characters like Emile’s greedy mother and ambitious manager get arias that allow the audience to understand them. The high point of the score is Emile’s long, moving “What Makes a Man a Man” in which he muses on the “Outside, Inside” conflict between the masculinity he must project in the ring and his true feelings. 

 At the Lyric, Justin Austin was a perfect young Emile musically and dramatically. Austin has a gorgeous baritone voice, reflecting the beauty inside his character. He is a superb actor who captures all Emile’s brashness and confusion.  Reginald Smith, Jr is deeply moving as the. dementia-ridden older Emile, still haunted by his killing of Benny Paret. In his meeting with Benny’s grown son, the climax of the opera, Smith captures Emile’s regret, but also his love of young Luis, who tenderly cares for him. Benny Paret, Jr. tells him that he must forgive himself and, in the final moment, older Emile forgives younger Emile. Smith has a powerful, booming baritone voice. The large supporting cast couldn’t be better. Veteran tenor Paul Groves (the only member of the Met cast in the Chicago production), offers a convincing Howie, who uses Emile to fulfill his own ambition. Fine young tenor Martin Luther Clark brings out the love and kindness in Emile’s caregiver, Luis.  The women’s roles are less well-rounded, but Whitney Morrison does what she can with Emile’s self-serving mother, and Meredith Arwady has fun with Kathy Hagen, the doyenne of the gay nightclub Emile frequents. This is the one case in which the Chicago performer paled in comparison with her Met counterpart, the veteran Stephanie Blythe, who made her brief appearances as Kathy star turns.

 James Robinson’s powerful production (sets by Allen Moyer; costumes by Montana Levi Blanco) was the best overall piece of musical theatre the Lyric has presented in years, perhaps since the three-quarters of David Pountney’s Ring cycle we got before Covid (will we ever see the Götterdämmerung?). It was a fitting contrast to the drabness of some recent productions. 

Masculinity and sexual orientation are the major issues in Champion. Still, this is an opera about a Black boxer in the 1960s when Black boxers were controlled by white managers and promoters. When Emile walks into a gay club, he comes into a place owned by whites. In the pre-Stonewall era, Kathy Hagen would be a figurehead for the bar’s invisible Mafia-related owners. The men Young Emile finds attractive are white. 

 Thanks to beautiful music, a strong libretto, and a dynamic production, the Lyric’s Champion is the grandest and strongest thus far of what might be called queer operas.

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^[1] Alex Ross, “The Decline of Opera Queens and the Rise of Gay Opera,” The New Yorker (July 27, 2017).

^[2] Michael Korie, libretto to Harvey Milk (booklet accompanying Teldec album)(Hamburg: Teldec Classics, 1997), 66. Further references to Harvey Milk are to this edition.

^[3] Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 46.

^[4] Ibid., 31.

^[5] David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 98.

^[6] Sam Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 62.

^[7] Abel, 66.

^[7] Harvey Milk was born in 1930. He would have been 15 in 1945.

^[8] The original production, which had its premiere at the Houston Opera and was subsequently mounted at the New York City Opera and, with revisions, at the San Francisco Opera, was directed by Christopher Alden with sets designed by Paul Steinberg. 

         As I cheered Daniel Radcliffe’s performance of “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” in Maria Friedman’s brilliant no-frills production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, I thought about what made the performance work so effectively. I have seen Radcliffe on stage in a variety of roles. For all his film fame, he is a charismatic stage animal. His big number, “Franklin Shepard, Inc.”, is one of those Sondheim word-filled patter songs depicting a character having a meltdown. Charlie, Radcliffe’s character, goes on a tv interview show with his songwriting collaborator and best friend, Franklin, and delivers a musical tirade on how Franklin has given up his art and is now only interested in money. The song is anger channeled into humor. It is also cruel—a public shaming of his closest friend. That’s a lot to capture in a three-minute song—a challenge for any musical theatre actor. Radcliffe nailed it and did so without ever getting up out of the chair he was sitting on. Everything he did was about and for Sondheim’s words and music. The result was a well-deserved deafening, prolonged ovation. One must also acknowledge Jonathan Groff’s performance as Franklin who was sitting next to Charlie, supposedly on national television, during this musical tirade. Without moving a muscle, Groff made us aware that the temperature was dropping in that room—that his friendship with Charlie is over. It’s a strange thing to say about a musical production, but the great thing about this production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG is its economy. There isn’t an unnecessary gesture. All the focus is on the characters and on Sondheim’s words and music. 

            The night before I watched Annaleigh Ashford ruin number after number in Thomas Kail’s revival of SWEENEY TODD by turning everything into schtick. Case in point: “A Little Priest,” the witty number that ends Act I. Mrs. Lovett has just thought up a way to dispose of the corpses Sweeney is driven to produce. They will become the meat in her meat pies. Sweeney’s delight in her ingenuity (and amorality) give him his only moment of joy in the entire show. He and she imagine the various types they will kill and cook (for instance “Shepherd’s pie peppered with genuine shepherd”). Sweeney sings: “The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.” He and Mrs. Lovett are like naughty children thinking up a prank. Of course, the song is both funny and horrifying. Josh Groban (the best Sweeney I have ever seen or heard and I’ve seen and heard a bunch of them beginning with the first, Len Cariou), tried to stay in character, which was difficult with Ashford turning the song into a schtickfest. With all her clowning around and efforts to make Groban laugh, it was impossible to pay attention to the clever lyrics. Ashfrd doesn’t really have enough voice to sing Mrs. Lovett and didn’t seem much interested in projecting a character. She just wanted to. make the audience  (and, if possible, Groban) laugh. If Groban was the best Sweeney I have seen, Ashford was the worst Mrs. Lovett. My undergraduate. Mrs. Lovetts had more of a sense of character. Yes, many in the audience loved her antics, but they had little if anything to do with portraying a character or a situation. Mrs. Lovett has to get frightening in the second act. Ashford couldn’t because she had worked too hard at being a clown. 

            Thomas Kail’s production looked pretty much like every other large-scale SWEENEY TODD. The large orchestra allowed us to savor Jonathan Tunick’s inventive orchestrations. Unfortunately, the lovers Joanna and Anthony were mediocre singers. Anthony’s big ballad “Joanna” is not easy to sing and some of the scoring is quite brassy. Obviously Sondheim and Tunick expected Anthony to have a strong voice. This Anthony sounded like he was in a high school production. Still, after a series of small-scale productions, it was exciting to see this classic given the kind of large-scale production it deserves.

            The high point of the new Stephen Sondheim-David Ives play with songs, HERE WE ARE, comes when David Hyde Pierce, playing a bishop, sings a song about how he wishes he were in any other occupation. The song is the last of Sondheim’s great patter songs. Pierce, another fine performer who knows that less is more, allows us in the audience to savor Sondheim’s wit. Pierce is the master of the light touch. I would love to have seen him in a Noel Coward play. He doesn’t have to work hard to be funny. He lets Sondheim’s lyrics do most of the work.

            HERE WE ARE is an adaptation of two Luis Bunuel films. The first act, based on THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, gives us a group of wealthy people trying to find someplace to eat. No restaurant seems to have any food. Waiters are surly or suicidal. At one eatery, a corpse is laid out on a banquet table. Is he about to become a meal for the guests? In the second act, based on THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, the group is invited to dinner by a sexy South American diplomat but for some reason they cannot leave the room. David Ives, a master of surrealism, has written a consistently funny script. Sondheim finished much of the scoring for the first act but, past an opening number, the second act is without songs. Thanks to a superb cast, clever direction by Joe Mantello and brilliant sets by David Zinn, HERE WE ARE is a constant delight despite being unfinished musically.

            With three productions running and SWEENEY TODD and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG breaking box office records, Stephen Sondheim’s day has come. The audiences at all three shows had a large percentage of under 30s. They were listening attentively and relishing the witty lyrics and beautiful tunes. Sondheim’s irony and bittersweet vision of human relationships seems more timely now that when his shows were first produced. And finally, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG has gotten a production that shows its richness.