When “Titaníque” opened in a cramped basement space two years ago, few would have imagined that the show, a commingling of the James Cameron disaster movie and the Celine Dion songbook, would amount to more than a short-lived lark. Yet it is still running — in a proper, aboveground theater — and has spawned productions in Britain, Canada and Australia.
Now Marla Mindelle, a writer of “Titaníque” who played the Dion role, is back with “The Big Gay Jamboree,” another raunchy, campy, hyperactive musical drenched in pop-culture references (though, this time, there is an original score). But whereas “Titaníque” had the casual flair of a tossed-off joke that somehow landed, “The Big Gay Jamboree” works itself into a tizzy with little to show for it. At least this time the production is starting off at a street-level venue, the Orpheum Theater, where it opened on Sunday.
In “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle, who wrote the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the score with Philip Drennen, takes on the juicy lead role of Stacey, an aspiring actress who, after a drunken blackout, finds herself transported to Bareback, Idaho, in 1945. Stacey may be awake, but she feels as if she is in a dream and a nightmare rolled into one. The dream part is that this hard-core show-tune fiend is not in a regular small town but in the musical-theater version of one. The nightmare is that she can’t leave. It’ll be familiar territory for fans of the TV series “Schmigadoon!,” in which a couple are marooned in a golden-age musical.
As Stacey tries to figure out a way back to her regular life and her godawful millionaire boyfriend, Keith (Alex Moffat, a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus), she gets to know her new supporting cast, including the man-hungry Flora (Natalie Walker) and the man-hungry Bert (Constantine Rousouli, the “Titaníque” co-writer and co-star).
It’s not long before Stacey realizes that life in a Broadway fantasy is not all it’s cracked up to be, and the good old days weren’t so great for men of a certain persuasion and women who enjoy a good time. Idaho in the 1940s probably wasn’t all too hot for Black men either, even if the town loves its music director, Clarence (Paris Nix), especially — only? — when he leads the gospel choir.
That is the one kind of music Bert is encouraged to sing, which allows “The Big Gay Jamboree” to mock musicals in which a Black character’s biggest number is a rousing gospel-tinged barnstormer — while pulling off the same stunt with Clarence. (I was reminded of “A Big Black Lady Stops the Show,” from “Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me,” in which Capathia Jenkins brought down the house by singing about how clichéd that trope is.)
Directed and choreographed by Connor Gallagher (with an ingenious set by the design collective Dots that makes the most of the Orpheum’s small stage), the production is simultaneously frantic and sluggish. Like “Titaníque,” the “Jamboree” script is packed with references to contemporary pop obsessions, most of them with strong gay followings; as Stacey puts it to Clarence, “in the future, if you wanna be successful, you’ve gotta get the gays.” Our heroine’s big “I want” song, for example, is about her longing to be cast as one of Bravo’s Real Housewives (“but not on Dubai”).
With so many jokes hurled at the wall, it is not surprising that some of them stick, as when Stacey muses, “Sometimes I’m like, Am I they/she? But I dunno, maybe I’m too old.”
There are just as many groaners and missteps, though the jury’s still out on a throwaway line about “that awful parody of ‘Titanic.’” It feels silly to bring up incongruities in this type of comedy, but you have to wonder why Bert tells Stacey that Judy Garland “hasn’t done much yet. But I think she’s gonna be big one day” when Garland’s star status was well established in 1945. More troubling, or at least suggesting a thoughtless desire to appear au courant, are lapses into witless misogyny.
The original score works by aggregating references to well-known musicals, like “The Gay B-C’s” spoofing “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music.” A highlight is Rousouli’s dance solo inspired by the “Music and the Mirror” number from “A Chorus Line,” in which he nails a well-calibrated mix of reverence, satire and abandon. That moment, among the few harking back to the goofball spirit of “Titaníque,” only accentuates how calculated the rest of the show feels.
The post ‘The Big Gay Jamboree’ Review: A Golden-Age Fantasia on Steroids appeared first on New York Times.
