A STORY OF LOVE, DEATH AND DANCING
AIDS-THEMED MUSICAL ‘EIGHTY-SIXED’ DEBUTS AT DIVERSIONARY
Playwright Jeremy J. King fell in love on first read with David B. Feinberg’s 1989 novel “Eighty-Sixed,” a witty confessional by a character named BJ Rosenthal, who’s on the hunt for a boyfriend in New York City as the AIDS epidemic spirals out of control.
As a 24-year-old gay man new to New York back in 2007, King said he could relate to BJ’s funny sex romp stories in the book’s first half, which is set in 1980, when AIDS didn’t even have a name yet. But King was also deeply troubled and moved by BJ’s experience in the novel’s second half, set in 1986, when cumulative U.S. AIDS deaths rose to 24,500.
“In the second half, all the stuff you experience as BJ is loaded now. You’re smack in the middle of the AIDS crisis,” King said. “I could transport myself there . ... It became something that needed to be told.”
After nearly nine years of development, BJ’s story is finally being told onstage this month at Diversionary Theatre, which is presenting the world premiere of “Eighty-Sixed,” a musical adaptation of Feinberg’s novel with a book by King and music and lyrics by composer Sam Salmond. The production’s A-list production team includes New York director Kevin Newbury and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. It opened in previews Thursday.
Matt M. Morrow, executive artistic director at Diversionary, said producing “Eighty-Sixed” is an important milestone in the company’s history.
“‘Eighty-Sixed’ represents the reason Diversionary exists,” Morrow said in a statement. “Founded at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1986,
our theater was founded to give a platform for our community to be seen and heard. Thirty-six years later, and now the third-oldest queer theatre in the country, Diversionary honors its founding impulse in producing this profound worldpremiere musical.”
Initially, King wrote “Eighty-Sixed” as a movie screenplay, but when he showed the script to Tonywinning Broadway producer Aaron Glick nearly nine years ago, Glick saw its potential as a musical. He commissioned the script and introduced King to Salmond over cocktails, and within two days Salmond had written the musical’s first song.
Unlike the book, which is told chronologically, the musical slips back and forth fluidly through time, which King said is true to how the character BJ processes memories: “BJ is always either trying to avoid a memory, running from a memory or battling to acknowledge a memory. That’s what we do as as community. For some people, it’s too
painful to look back.”
Salmond, 35, said memory is also a vital component in his score, which he describes as a contemporary take on ’80s pop-rockdance music with influences from Elton John, Whitney Houston, Fleetwood Mac and more. The upbeat score reflects the novel, Salmond said, which is funny and irreverent and celebrates the joy and happiness of love and sex.
“We want that energy of being at a concert where music goes through your body and you want to dance to it,” Salmond said. “A lot of the language of the show is around these memories of the dance floor and the joy in music.”
King and Salmond are both in their mid-30s, which King calls the “in-between” generation of gay men who want to pass along the experience of the older generation’s AIDS experience to a younger audience.
“We’re talking to people who survived the crisis and people like us who are the children of the crisis and people behind us who have no connection to it,” King, 37, said.
“It’s more than an AIDS play. It’s a human play. It’s about connection and finding community in times of crisis. We don’t want to leave people devastated. Our final gesture is to celebrate the memories of the people in our lives that we’ve connected with and pass those on.”