Remake that struggles to live up to the original ground-breaking classic
The Boys in the Band
15 cert, 122 min ★★★
Dir Joe Mantello
Starring Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Charlie Carver, Robin de Jesús, Tuc Watkins, Michael Benjamin Washington, Brian Hutchison
In 1968, Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band created a sensation off-broadway, running for 1,001 performances. Never before had homosexuality been explored so frankly and without apology on the stage, at a time when hardly anyone – including the gay men constituting about half the original cast – dared come out. Crowley’s comedy-drama about a New York birthday party, with its simple two-act structure designed to bare the souls of a group of friends, was in no way formally radical, but it was a giant breakthrough for honest representation – a feat cemented by the identically cast film version, directed by an up-and-coming William Friedkin, in 1970.
The logic of going back to this play now, which Joe Mantello did when he directed the 2018 revival on Broadway, has nothing to do with updating it or underlining its relevance for today. Kept in period, it’s about re-examining attitudes from 50 years ago – especially the curse of internalised homophobia – in the liberal present.
Mantello has imported all of that cast for this Netflix film version, under the producing aegis of Ryan Murphy. They’re openly gay, to a man – and the very possibility of this
proves how times have changed. It remains an actors’ piece, too, as the play always was.
It’s right there that it both thrives and wobbles. With a nearly identical text – even some grotesquely dated racial language has stayed in – this needs a lot of zest to feel fresh. And it does build up with some bounce, especially once the nine-strong party is in full swing.
The shindig is being thrown by fretting host Michael (Jim Parsons) for the imperious Harold (Zachary Quinto), who arrives last, as he always does, and gets most of the best lines. But there’s blood on the floor already, not least given that Michael’s historically straight college pal Alan (Brian Hutchinson) has crashed the joint in black tie, got drunk, and clobbered the campiest guy, Emory (Robin de Jesús), for offending him to his self-hating core.
The play tackles a grab-bag of gay issues with zippy flair. It’s often accused of parading stereotypes
more than it dissects them, but that charge hinges less on Crowley’s quipdelivery system than what layers the performers manage to find. Quinto is inspired, but the one thing hampering his work is the memory of the ur-harold, extraordinary Leonard Frey: to one degree or another, everyone has to fight against that problem.
The mean game that Michael inflicts on everyone in the second half – a variation on “get the guests” from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – feels like a more cumbersome device than it ever has. And while Mantello’s camera makes some shrewd observations, it doesn’t match the glee, grot or sadness that Friedkin put on screen.
You realise just how much that production – and the underrated film – have buoyed the play up over the years.