Decades later, ‘Boys in Band’ still resonates
Adaptation of smash play comes close to required viewing
Many aspects of life have been all but wiped out, if only temporarily, by the coronavirus pandemic. Live theater is counted among them.
That helps to explain why, as fantastic as the awardwinning musical is, there was such an incredible thirst for the terrific, live-recording version of “Hamilton” that landed on Disney+ in early July. Watching that unbelievable cast perform on stage — via our TV screens — was as close to being in an actual theater as we’d gotten in months.
While it’s a different animal, in that it’s an actual film, the new Netflix adaptation of Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band” certainly gives you some of those night-at-thetheater vibes.
It should. The ensemble drama — set almost entirely during a gathering of friends, all gay men, to celebrate a birthday and almost entirely in one nicely appointed apartment — boasts the director of its 2018 Broadway revival, Joe Mantello, who keeps the energy of a stage production intact while putting the story in front of a camera.
The movie also has the benefit of the revival’s fine cast, which includes wellknown actors Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. ( The cast also, quite notably, consists entirely of men who identify publicly as gay.)
Of course, having those various talents from the stage show involved with the movie does not guarantee “The Boys in the Band” would be a fine film. Fortunately, though, it is, the movie pulling you into the interpersonal dynamics of these characters.
Oh, to have been around when this play debuted offBroadway in 1968 and, understandably, created quite a stir. As the movie’s production notes put it, the play came “a half-century before our current strides toward equality,” when “gays and lesbians were forbidden to be themselves in public, where they could be arrested, fired, shunned, even beaten.”
Interestingly, Crowley wrote the play after New York Times critic Stanley Kauffman challenged gay playwrights to stop disguising the male-male relationships they wanted to examine through the lens of male-female dynamics and actually write gay characters.
Like the play, already adapted into a TV film in 1970 that was helmed by “The French Connection” director William Friedkin, the new movie is set in 1968 New York City, which is energetically established early by Mantello via a montage of the characters set to Aretha Franklin’s version of “Hold on, I’m Comin’.”
The first to arrive at the apartment of overspending, overindulging screenwriter Michael (Parson) is his former lover, the book-devouring, self-analyzing Donald (Matt Bomer), to whom Michael laments about the elaborate comb-over hiding his receding hairline.
“The Boys in the Band” has so many characters that it can’t quite do justice to all of them.
Thanks in part to the performances of the actors who inhabit them, we’d love to have gotten more insight.