“THE BOYS IN THE BAND’’ ON NETFLIX, 2020. From left, Michael (Jim Parsons), Alan (Brian Hutchison) and Hank (Tuc Watkins) on the terrace of Michael’s Greenwich Village apartment. Set design by Mindy R. Toback.
THE BROADWAY “REVIVAL” OF Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band” closed a little more than two years ago, in August 2018. But now its handsome, predominantly big-name cast (led by Jim.Parsons) and its director, Joe Mantello, have recreated it for our home screens — on Netflix.
There were mixed reactions to the production. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley called it a “starry but disconnected revival.” Yet the production won the Tony Award for best revival of a play. (Technical,y it wasn’t a revival. It had certainly played in New York before but only in an Off Broadway house.) I tend to agree with Brantley here, though for completely different reasons than the ones he discussed in print.
Disconnected. Yes, that’s a good word.
“THE BOYS IN THE BAND” ON BROADWAY, 2018. The action takes place is 1968, the apartment (a duplex in Greenwich Village) is Michael’s, and the set design is by David Zinn.
First of all, the Netflix version looks more like the original 1970 movie than it does the recent Broadway staging, which had David Zinn’s red velvet scenic design. Second, when I saw the 1970 movie (with a male friend who came out three years later), I had never spent an evening with seven or eight gay men “in their natural habitat,” as we — and they — used to say. And although the film was supposed (I was told) to show me how unhappy homosexual men were, it showed me much more vividly how clever and adorable they were. And you didn’t have to worry that one of them that you didn’t ike would come on to you. You didn’t have to worry that any of them would come on to you.
“THE BOYS IN THE BAND” MOVIE, 1970 Partygoers recall their old Fire Island dance routine on Michael’s terrace, decorated with Chinese lanterns. Cliff Gorman, who played Emory, is second from right.
Watching this cast — including Jim Parsons as Michael, the fashionable but debt-burdened host; Zachary Quinto as Harold, the bitter, pot-smoking birthday boy with bad skin; Andrew Rannells as the chronically promiscuous Larry; Matt Bomer as Michael’s enthusiastically neurotic ex and Brian Hutchison as Alan, Michael’s old college friend who still doesn’t know Michael is gay — I kept thinking of Elisabeth Moss.
The usually brilliant Elisabeth Moss, that is, attempting to be the 1960s-and-onward title character on Broadway in “The Heidi Chronicles” a few years ago.
THE HEIDI CHRONICLES, Broadway, 2015. Elisabeth Moss, who played Heidi in the revival, wasn’t living as an American woman in any 1968 that I ever met.
Moss, who was born in 1982, nailed her “Mad Men” (2007-15) character: Peggy Olson, who is hired by a midcentury advertising agency as a secretary, because that’s what women were hired as — but gradually comes to own her own talents and confidence. In recent years she nailed Offred, her character in “A Handmaid’s Tale,” who lives in Gilead, a theocratic future U.S.A. where women have lost all rights.
But when it came to playing Heidi Holland in Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which begins chronologically with a Eugene McCarthy rally after-party in Seven Sisters country, her cultural attitudes seemed to be an uncomfortable mix of decades.
BIRTHDAY CANDLES Zachary Quinto as Harold in the Netflix version of “The Boys in the Band.”
The same thing seems to have happened to the newest “Boys in the Band” cast, all of whom are identified in publicity materials as openly gay (a term we wish we could stop having to use). Maybe they can’t completely inhabit Michael and Harold and the rest, because they can’t or won’t dig deep down enough to feel the separateness and shame that the generation before them lived with every day. Who would want to go back to that?
Mart Crowley, the playwright who was in his 80s when he died in March of this year, would have noticed. The Netflix script is credited to him and to Ned Martel, a longtime associate of the show’s producer — the A-gay of this and any other season — Ryan Murphy. They worked together on “Hollywood,” “American Horror Story” and “Glee.”
REMEMBER HOW WE USED TO DO IT ON FIRE ISLAND?. From left, Parsons, Robin de Jesús (as Emory), Michael Benjamin Washington and Rannells in the Netflix movie.
The plot was considered daring in 1968, when the Off Broadway play opened. Michael is hosting a small birthday party at his apartment for his frenemy Harold. The guests are six other gay men. The party is invaded by Alan, the old college friend who is in New York on business and really needs to talk. Slowly —- way too slowly, it seems — Alan realizes that his best friend from college is gay, as is every other man in the room. Meanwhile, Harold’s birthday present, a cute but dumb young hustler who has never seen lasagna before, sits around cluelessly. And everybody plays a telephone game that assigns points for calling a man from your past and declaring your love.
Despite all the wit — and even though Clive Barnes of The New York Times did call the original Off Broadway staging ‘screamingly funny” — “The Boys in the Band” was never a comedy,
Ben Brantley loved Robin de Jesús as Emory, the joyously effeminate designer. I didn’t, but probably only because I will always want Cliff Gorman in that role. You never really forget the first man who looks into your eyes (through a camera lens) and asks, “Who do you have to fuck to a get a drink around here?”
“The Boys in the Band,” by Mart Crowley. Directed by Joe Mantello. With the original Broadway cast of the 2018 revival. 2 hours 2 minutes. Netflix..