THE BOYS IN THE BAND ARE BACK!
With Ryan Murphy’s revival about to open on Broadway, Marc Andrews looks back at the original Boys In The Band.
With Ryan Murphy’s revival about to open on Broadway, we look back at the original Boys… and preview the new production.
FIFTY YEARS young this year, The Boys In The Band is still, arguably, one of the most important gay-themed plays in theatre. It is frank, funny and often painful to watch. That five decades later, a play that puts gay life centre stage is still rare, says much about its continuing relevance.
When The Boys In The Band premiered off Broadway in New York in 1968, it titillated and shocked mainstream theatregoers with its brutal portrayal of a small group of gay friends. Gay men flocked to the show, finally seeing an honest depiction of their lives on stage.
Hollywood leading lady, Natalie Wood helped finance the play, whose title references the Judy Garland movie, A Star Is Born (later remade by Barbra Streisand and, due for release this year, a millennial version starring Lady Gaga).
The original stage production was such a hot ticket that a double-album recording of the play’s dialogue became a best-seller. The initial run of The Boys In The Band closed after 1,000 performances, two-and-a-half years later in 1970. The play coincided with the raised consciousness of the era that lead to the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the beginning of a golden age for gay men of sex, drugs and disco.
Hollywood director William Friedkin transferred the play to the big screen in 1970. The original stage cast reprised their roles, plus there was a somewhat pointless Kardashianlike cameo from a model/actress of the era, Maud Adams. A game-changer, it brought a gay-themed movie to cinemagoers and, rather hilariously, holds the dubious honour of being the first movie to use the word “cunt”.
It was a modest box-office hit and scored a Golden Globe nomination but, notably, was not considered Oscar-worthy material. The movie also had to contend with community accusations that the film, and now the play by default, were
out-dated, self-loathing indictments of gay life, pandering to straight people’s notions that gay men were twitchy, bitchy, fucked-up deviants. Friedkin was straight. In the following years he directed The Exorcist and The French Connection and, notably, become embroiled in another homo-controversy courtesy of his gay serial killer movie, Cruising in 1980.
By the ’80s, The Boys In The Band was largely considered a cultural relic. In the era of Pride and HIV-activism, the play was considered something of an embarrassment. Many of its characters are uncomfortably flamboyant, others are stiflingly closeted, and some wrestle with heteronormative concepts around monogamy. Internalised homophobia and shame motivates all the characters. This was not the gay world the out-and-proud ’80s wanted to see.
The play’s tarnished reputation was repaired, somewhat, in the mid ’90s with a brief revival. In 2002 the play’s writer, Mart Crowley, penned a sequel, The Men From The Boys. Set 30 years later at a memorial, it had limited runs in NYC, San Francisco and LA.
A 2017 UK revival starring Mark Gatiss received mixed reviews.
This year, five decades after its initial success, a new, full-scale Broadway production is being mounted, but it has taken gay TV impresario Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) and a who’s-who of gay A-list actors to do it.
Though very much of its time, the original The Boys
In The Band has been praised as “Shakespearean” and panned as “self-homophobic”. Yet, half a century later, it offers a contemporary snapshot into gay life that modern audiences will still recognise as authentic.
In 1968, it shocked theatregoers, but gay men flocked to it, finally seeing an honest depiction of their lives on stage.