Sing Out, Louise

Finding Ourselves Onstage

BY MICHAEL KEARNS

While standing in line at the Egyptian Theatre, my date cattily compared a mutual friend to the huckster Harold Hill from The Music Man. “You know that song,” he said, and then feebly attempted to sing a line or two. “You're in big trouble, in this here city…rhymes with 'c' which rhymes with 'p.'”

“You got Trouble,” I corrected him, “right here in River City, with a capital 'T' and that rhymes with 'p' and that stands for 'pool.'” When I was a youngster, “You Got Trouble” was one of the many Broadway show songs I memorized, from beginning to end. It was my second favorite recitative number, the first being “Rose's Turn” from Gypsy.

It was a follow spot moment, realizing that this quaint ability I have to quote show tunes verbatim qualifies me as a “theatre nerd” and/or a “musical geek.” Yikes.

“As anyone who saw the surprisingly multigenerational audience at Rufus Wainwright's tribute at the Hollywood Bowl can attest,” writes Mark Olsen in the New York Times, “there is something strongly reassuring in knowing that, for all the ways in which our culture seems to be mutating and advancing at an unstoppable pace, theater nerds and musical geeks will abide.”

In his eighties, the Reverend Malcolm Boyd says, “I burn incense to the theater gods who give me wisdom and oxygen. The theater opens me to reality, makes me laugh and cry, and helps me understand life.

“I learned about the kindness of strangers when I saw [Marlon] Brando and [Jessica]Tandy in A Streetcar Named Desire. The tragic element of failure in American success seared my consciousness when I saw the theater masterpiece Death of a Salesman. A revelation about the meaning of communication awaited me when Jerry (in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story) exclaimed: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other."

Performance artiste Tim Miller, on the verge of turning fifty, remembers seeing 1776 at the Music Center in Los Angeles when he was ten years old. “As a small boy, I worshipped the musical 1776.”

“It inspired me profoundly for its frank political assessment of the darker contradictions present at our nation's birth. There is a song from 1776—'Is Anybody There?'—that John Adams sings at the end of the show as his idealism hits rock bottom when the southern colonies at the Continental Congress refuse to vote for independence if slavery is abolished.”

“This dark-night-of-the-soul song, whose lyrics were taken from John Adams' diaries, has been with me at the Supreme Court hearing for my NEA case, as I was arrested outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles with ACT-UP and as I refuse to have my Australian partner Alistair and I messed with by our nation's unjust laws that deny us the civil right—and rite—of marriage and immigration protection.”

I must have gained some political consciousness when I saw Gore Vidal's The Best Man when I was twelve or thirteen but what I remember most vividly is the sight of all these dashingly handsome men onstage in the throes of high-decimal drama. While other boys my age were getting off looking at copies of National Geographic, I got hard while watching flesh-and-blood actors in the theatre.

The other musical that rocked my teenage world was a revival of West Side Story with Anna Maria Alberghetti as Maria, singing to her beloved Tony: “I have a love, and it's all that I have. Right or wrong, what else can I do? I love him; I'm his, And everything he is I am, too.” An anthem to queerness.

This is where we might consider why multitudes of gay men are drawn to the theatre and, in many cases, especially musical theater. For me, even at an early age, it was that manifestation of soaring romanticism and deep longing that I felt inside but knew wasn't appropriate to express outloud. The unreality of the stage somehow seemed to be more real-in the way that I wanted to experience reality-than my stifled existence where love songs and passionate refrains didn't exist.

Our responses are not only emotional, they ricochet throughout the body, creating accompanying physical sensations.

A self-described “theatre geek/freak” in his mid-forties, Corey Roskin, Social Services Specialist for the City of West Hollywood, experienced his first theatrical orgasm while seeing The Wiz as a teenager. “When the dancer with the billowing cloth atop her head became the tornado surrounding Dorothy's house, it was pure shiver-inducing magic,” Roskin remembers. “And when Toto runs into Dorothy's arms during the final moments of the closing song 'Home,' I squealed and cried at the same time.

“My heart felt like it was leaping out of my chest,” Derek Ringold recalls when he saw Rent. The 27-year old performer remembers, “Every fiber of my being felt connected and alive, like my entire life was screaming at me, 'This is it!' Seeing the show on Broadway when I was fifteen years old was something that I needed so badly at the time to help with the feelings of shame and loneliness that haunted me daily. I walked out of the theatre on such a high because everything in my life started to make sense.”

If you're a theatre nerd or a musical geek, you share a collective gay sensibility that is a virtual storehouse of lyrics and melodies, scenes and plots, characters and relationships, conflicts and happy endings, morals and lessons that have illuminated your discovery of self.

Curtain.