Boys will be boys, again
Ryan Murphy getting the ‘Band’ back together for a golden-anniversary celebration
RYANMurphy, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, may make a run at Broadway. Murphy, the creator of “Glee” and “Feud,” has optioned “The Boys in the Band,” Mart Crowley’s pre-Stonewall play about a group of gay men who gather for a birthday party and some deliciously bitchy banter. The play debuted in 1968, and sources say Murphy would like to stage a 50th anniversary revival on Broadway next spring.
No casting yet, but insiders say Jim Parsons, whom Murphy directed in HBO’s “The Normal Heart,” would be perfect as Emory, the flamboyant interior decorator. There’s also talk that Neil Patrick Harris would make a swell Michael, the host of the party. He has the famous (and controversial) line, “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
As for Harold, the sharp- tongued birthday boy, why not Mark Gatiss, one of the stars of British TV’s “Sherlock”? He played that role in the London revival of the play last year, and the Daily Telegraph said he cut “a fabulously sinister, aloof and angular figure.”
“The Boys in the Band” shocked early audiences with its openly gay characters and caustic dialogue, yet the play’s reputation has fluctuated over the years. At one point, it was slammed for perpetuating gay stereotypes. More recently, it’s been embraced for its humor and historical significance.
Clive Barnes, longtime theater critic for The Post and the New York Times, put his finger on its appeal in his original 1968 review: “It is about a long, bloody and alcoholic party; but only the superficial … will see it as a pack of youngish middleage fairy queens shouting
bitchisms at one another down the long night . . . The power of the play … is the way in which it remorselessly peels away the pretensions of its characters and reveals a pessimism so uncompromising in its honesty that it becomes in itself an affirmation of life.”
Crowley wrote the play in about four weeks in the summer of 1967. He was, as he once told me, “down on my ass and dead broke.” He could barely pay the rent when his friend, actress Diana Lynn, asked him to house-sit at her Beverly Hills, Calif., mansion while she and her husband, Mortimer Hall, went off on their yacht. (Fun fact: Mortimer’s mother was Dorothy Schiff, who owned The Post for 40 years.)
Crowley wrote much of the play by the pool in what he called “that great combination of anger and despair that gets you going.”
Producer Richard Barr and playwright Edward Albee put the play on at their Greenwich Village theater in January 1968. Only a handful of people attended the first performance. But word got out, and the remaining performances were standingroom only. Barr moved the play that spring to an offBroadway theater, where it ran 1,001 performances. William Friedkin directed the 1970 movie, which featured the cast from the play. I saw the film not long ago, and it holds up well — a period piece, to be sure, but the zingers still zing and the cast is terrific.
This is one revival that I’m looking forward to seeing.