Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✩✩✩✩
music by Micah Barnes, written and directed by Sky Gilbert
The Cabaret Company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, , Toronto
April 17-27, 2008
A show could hardly have a more misleading title than Happy: A Very Gay Little Musical. Promoted as “the first new Sky Gilbert musical since 1991,” Happy is 90 minutes long and has only four songs, three poorly sung, only one of which, “The Faghag’s Lament,” is entertaining, interpreted as it is by the inimitable Sharon Matthews. That’s a rather excessive talk-to-music ratio for any show to be termed a “musical.” There is a piano on stage but it receives only the occasional plonk. The songs themselves are sung to an overloud prerecorded accompaniment. Besides this, the tone not “happy” but humourlessly sarcastic. A title like Bitter: A Rant-cum-Melodrama about Gay Marriage would be more accurate.
The play concerns a married gay couple who write musicals--Bob (David Tomlinson), the writer and lyricist, and Dave (Jason Cadieux), the composer. They happen to be writing a musical with the same title as the play. Using a trick borrowed from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing (1982), Gilbert begins his play with a scene from Bob and Dave’s musical. They have invited their self-described faghag dramaturge friend Sue (Sharon Matthews) to critique their musical. In what is now a tired postmodern theme, the boys’ musical is about a gay couple writing a musical being critiqued by a faghag dramaturge friend. Unlike Stoppard, Gilbert is not interested in the line between art and reality. Instead, the fictional threesome is indistinguishable from the “real” threesome, except that the fictional Bob is more flamboyant. In either case, the play functions primarily as a mouthpiece for Bob to praise marriage and platonic love and to decry the cult of camp and promiscuity he feels define pre-AIDS gayness and that are still embodied in such playwrights as Brad Fraser. This is only one of Gilbert’s innumerable and annoying private jokes.
Unsurprisingly, with the arrival of web-cam kid Tom (Jamieson Eakin), Bob is revealed as a hypocrite so that it is clear Gilbert’s heavy-handed irony is intended to expose gay marriage as assimilationist, puritanical, sanctimonious and, ultimately, anti-gay. To whom precisely this play is meant to appeal is unclear. Presumably it will be an older generation who understands the references at the top of the show to Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark (1988). All those who are younger and more open-minded or expecting a real musical will find Gilbert’s show far more off-putting than “happy.”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-04-20.
Photo: David Tomlinson and Sharron Matthews. ©David Hawe.
2008-04-20
Happy: A Very Gay Little Musical