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

 Early in this century, Canadian writer-performer Bob Martin co-created and starred in a musical, The Drowsy Chaperone (music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison). Like The Boy Friend, a hit in London and New York in the 1950s (it introduced Julie Andrews to Broadway audiences), The Drowsy Chaperone was a funny but loving tribute to mindless 1920s musicals, which were full of stock cardboard characters and silly plots, but often had great scores. A few years ago, Martin wrote the book for The Prom, about four totally self-absorbed, unemployed Broadway performers who decided to descend upon a small-town Indiana high school prom after reading that a lesbian student was forbidden to bring her female date to the event. The show ran for 300 performances on Broadway (a long run in the 1930s, but now not enough of a run to break even), and was turned into a truly awful Netflix musical, a contender for one of the worst movie musicals ever made. 

 Martin seems intent on bringing back the musical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s, with their stock characters and silly situations, before creators like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim worried about things like three-dimensional characters and songs that were specific to the character and situation. Those shows often had great scores by the likes of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, or Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The Drowsy Chaperone and The Prom had totally forgettable scores. The shows veer in the direction of camp but don’t want to go so far as to alienate straight audiences. 

Now Martin has written the book for Boop (playing at the CIBC Theatre in Chicago through Christmas Eve), a show that cries out for a camp approach. After all, what could be more camp than a musical about 1930s cartoon character Betty Boop? In the midst of cartoon mice, ducks and rabbits, Betty Boop stood out as a sexy female human. She was a bit brainless, but clever enough to foil her pursuers. Betty had a resurgence of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s when her cartoons appeared on television. I wondered how many of the kids in the audience had any idea who Betty Boop is. Why create a musical around her in 2023?  

What would happen if Betty Boop was projected from her black and white world into 2023 New York City—in the middle of a Comic Con convention, of course? That is the situation that drives Boop. She immediately meets the love of her life, a handsome jazz trumpeter, as well as a teenage best friend. Somehow, she also gets involved in the election campaign of a sleazy mayoral candidate. Meanwhile, her grandfather and dog pursue her because her old black and white world will die out if she doesn’t return. 

 Essentially, Boop is a high tech 1930s musical. Apart from the revved up synth-heavy orchestrations and the high volume, the songs could be from a typical pre-Sondheim, pre-rock show. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as good as the scores of the musicals of Betty Boop’s era. There is one that might still be in your ear when you leave the theatre, a cute old-fashioned tune, “Why Look Around the Corner.” It reminded me a bit of “Once in Love with Amy,” from Frank Loesser’s 1948?? show, Where’s Charley. That song included an audience singalong. This one has the lyrics projected onto the set with a bouncing ball cuing the audience to sing along. As far as I could tell, no one did. Few in the audience were old enough to remember the bouncing ball singalongs that sometimes preceded movies at the local theatre back in the day. It’s as if Stephen Sondheim and Hamilton never existed. Songs seem unmotivated by plot or character. Subplots abound but the characters are all cardboard. Despite the frenetic movement, the show seems oddly static. The sets are clever but look cheap.

 Old-time musicals were really funny with lines written by wits like P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, George S. Kaufmann, and Morrie Ryskind and delivered by comics like Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante. Despite the efforts of Broadway veterans like Faith Prince and Erich Bergen, Boop isn’t funny. It elicited few big laughs from the audience at the performance I attended. Those were mostly inspired by a puppet dog. Jerry Mitchell has provided his usual frenetic direction.

  What saves the show is the charm and talent of the stars. Jasmine Amy Rogers who plays Betty Boop has very few credits to her name but bursts with star quality. She sings superbly and has great comic timing. Now we can only hope that she gets a vehicle worthy of her abundant talent. Ainsley Anthony Melham, her leading man, has a fine baritone voice. Unlike 1950s leading men, he can also dance. Veteran Broadway comedienne Faith Prince has an underwritten part, but still knows how to sell a comic number, even when it isn’t particularly funny. Erich Bergen, who plays the sleek, sleazy politician, has virtually nothing to do in the first act, but has two delightful numbers in the second. 

 If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Boop doesn’t stand much of a chance on Broadway. It’s mildly enjoyable but totally empty headed and is saddled with a mediocre score. It needs to be funnier. But I’m terrible at guessing the future of musicals. I have friends who invest in musicals. If I liked a show in previews, they wouldn’t invest in it. I thought The Lion King was dull.

A few years ago, the brilliant British director Marianne Elliott, decided to create a new production of the 1970 Stephen Sondheim/George Furth/Hal Prince creation, COMPANY. COMPANY began as a series of short one-act plays about marriage by George Furth. Producer-Director Harold Prince had the idea of turning them into a musical. To give the skits some continuity, Furth created a character, Robert, a commitment-phobic thirty-five year-old bachelor who was good friends with the married couples. The wives had crushes on him; the husbands envied his freedom. Still, all the couples hoped that Robert would find a partner and settle down as they did. The problem is that Robert is something of a cipher, an affable man who doesn’t reveal himself to anyone. As three of his lovers sing, “You impersonate a person better than a zombie could.” At the end, he gets the big 11 o’clock number, “Being Alive” in which he finally admits that he wants and needs a loving partner. It’s one of those instant conversions only possible in musicals and situation comedies.

Dean Jones, the original Robert, pulled out of the show a few weeks after it opened. Larry Kerr stepped in and, though he sang the part well, never made Robert into much of a character. In my many viewings of COMPANY, I only have seen two actors, both British, make the audience care about Robert. Adrian Lester did it on sheer charisma. Rupert Young truly presented a charming guy who seemed to have something he was scared of showing other people.

Many of us gay men back at the beginning of gay liberation saw Robert as a gay man. Like him, many of us were the safe gay third wheels for our married friends. We were safe to be around the wives and the husbands showed how cool they were by being chummy with a gay guy. Robert made sense in that context. When I was writing my book, SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS, COMPANY book writer George Furth called me to assure me that Bobby was not gay. However, no one can stop audiences from reading plays, movies and musicals from their own experience.

Marianne Elliott has turned Robert into Bobbi, a thirty-five year old marriage-phobic woman. Bobbi is frightened of all the physical facts of marriage, pregnancy and child-rearing: wiping the husband’s urine off of the rim of the toilet bowl, cleaning house, being left home while the husband goes out to play. She sees marriage as a trap, the end of the party. She also sees the quirky relationships her married friends have.

Oddly, the one man she proposes to is gay. That will eliminate anything physically intrusive from the relationship. He wisely marries the man he loves.

Yet, Bobbi clearly feels the biological clock ticking. In fact, the sound of the busy signal that dominated the original production has been replaced by a loud ticking clock.

To turn Robert into Bobbi, some other characters needed to have sex changes. Bobbi’s eccentric fuck buddies turn into men. One of the heterosexual couples has morphed into a gay couple. In some scenes, to give the wives more agency, Elliott has given the wives lines that used to be assigned to the husbands.

Does it all work? Well, it works better than many productions I have seen with a male Robert. It partly works because the National Touring Company is so well cast. Britney Coleman looks gorgeous, sings beautifully and successfully projects Bobbi’s charm and her elusiveness. Matt Rodin steals the show with his “I’m Not Getting Married Today,” and his love for but frustration with the totally loving Paul (Ali Louis Bourzgui, the brilliant star of the Goodman’s recent revival of TOMMY). All the couples have been directed to be characters, not caricatures. The one weak link was Joanne (Judy McLane), who gets all the wonderful bitchy barbed lines and the classic “Ladies Who Lunch.” Somehow in this production, you wonder why Joanne is part of this younger gang, and “Ladies Who Lunch” seems unnecessary. Why does she sing it in a trendy nightclub? It now seems pasted into the show. McLane’s shrill delivery doesn’t help.

Sondheim’s score is still brilliant, and, with the exception of “Ladies Who Lunch,” all the songs are well-sung and acted and cleverly staged. In Marianne Ellliott’s hands, the show really works. Stephen Sondheim approved of the changes. So do I. It’s a brilliant, inventive take on a flawed classic.

In 2019, director Rikiya Imaizumi created a television miniseries, His: I Didn’t Think I Would Fall in Love (available on Dekkoo), about the beginning of a romance between two teenage boys. Nagisa Hibino has left his family and now works in a hotel in a seaside town. We are never told why he and his parents didn’t get along, but we can infer that it has something to do with his awareness of and shame about his sexual orientation. Local girls develop crushes on him but, much as he would like to, Nagisa can’t respond. Nagisa’s passion is surfing. Shun Igawa comes to town to visit his father who works there, but the father goes off on a business trip leaving Shun alone. Shun is a taciturn boy who has trouble expressing his feelings, perhaps because he, like Nagisa, is frightened of revealing his sexual orientation.

Once the boys meet, Nagisa takes over Shun’s life. He teaches his friend how to surf and finds him a place to stay with the family of the owner of a surfboard shop. The man, his wife and his teenage daughter have become a surrogate family for Nagisa and quickly absorb Shun into their family unit. Over the five episodes, we see a growing attraction between the two boys that they cannot express until the last minutes of the series.

His: I Didn’t Think I Would Fall in Love is a touching, sometimes painful picture of how difficult it is to come out in conformist Japanese society. Nagisa talks about the rejection he experienced when he tried to come out to his best friend. It is fear of rejection that keeps them from confessing their love for each other.

Rikiya Imaizumi’s feature film His (2020, available on YouTube), picks up the story over a decade later. We see in a couple of brief flashbacks that Nagisa and Shun were lovers throughout their university years, but at the end of that period, Nagisa breaks off the relationship. Shun goes to work in a white collar job in a city, but rumors of his gay past surface. Shun’s response is to leave his job and. the city and move to a small town where he lives the life of a recluse, growing vegetables which he trades or sells for the things he needs. He has never totally gotten over his love for Nagisa. Fearing rejection, he has pretty much rejected other people. Much to his surprise, Nagisa shows up at his doorstep with a six-year-old daughter. After college, Nagisa tried unsuccessfully to become a professional surfer in Australia. After some unsatisfying affairs with men, he became involved with Rena, a translator. When she became pregnant, he married her and became househusband and primary parent to their daughter, Sora. However, proud he was of living a “normal” life, he couldn’t happily continue in his marriage. Though it takes him a while to admit it–neither man is great at communicating his feelings–Nagisa has come back because he has realized the power of his love for Shun.

One dimension of the film is how the two men will be able to develop a kind of marriage in this village, comprised mostly of elderly people. I have been to some of these lovely Japanese villages where almost all of the young adults have moved away, leaving communities of senior citizens trying to survive economically. Until Nagisa and Sora arrive, Shun has kept his distance from people he thinks wouldn’t approve of him. Will the two men be able to live as a couple in this community?

The larger question that takes up half the film is who will get custody of Sora. Nagisa has been her primary caregiver, but many things work against Nagisa’s bid for custody, none more than his relationship with another man. Rena is trying to balance the demands of a career with being a mother, a problem for women everywhere, but particularly one in a traditional male-dominated society. Rena is the only woman we see in a business meeting. The custody trial is equally cruel to Nagisa and Rena. Rena’s lawyer cannot hide his disgust at Nagisa’a relationship with another man, but Nagoya’s female attorney is equally cruel to Rena, showing no sympathy for the difficulties she faces as a working single mother.

The outcome of the trial will be no surprise, but how that outcome is reached is both startling and deeply moving. The final scene is a lovely creation of a tentative reconciliation, and a gesture of friendship on Rena’s part toward Shun. Young Sora, of course, would like to be with her mother, her father, and Shun. To what extent will she get her wish?

At over two hours, His may seem long and a bit slow to viewers who are not used to Asian films. The focus is on characters and the lingering closeups let us inside people who are not adept at verbalizing their feelings. Shun particularly is a man of very few words. His Miyazawa is brilliant at capturing with face and body language what Shun is feeling. HIs silent, shocked reaction to Nagisa’s arrival on his doorstep is brilliantly played. Nagisa is childlike, if not childish. We can see why he has such a strong bond with his six-year-old daughter. His emotional volubility is a contrast to Shun’s guardedness. Kisetsu Fujiwara shows us Nagisa’s vulnerability and essential kindness. Both actors convince us that these to men are destined to be together.

His is a lovely film, superbly written, directed and acted. I would give it five stars.

Welcome to WordPress! This is a sample post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey. To add more content here, click the small plus icon at the top left corner. There, you will find an existing selection of WordPress blocks and patterns, something to suit your every need for content creation. And don’t forget to check out the List View: click the icon a few spots to the right of the plus icon and you’ll get a tidy, easy-to-view list of the blocks and patterns in your post.

Welcome to WordPress! This is a sample post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey. To add more content here, click the small plus icon at the top left corner. There, you will find an existing selection of WordPress blocks and patterns, something to suit your every need for content creation. And don’t forget to check out the List View: click the icon a few spots to the right of the plus icon and you’ll get a tidy, easy-to-view list of the blocks and patterns in your post.