Owning Up: The Musical

Last night I went to see a documentary called Show Business: The Road to Broadway (terrible title). It chronicles four Broadway musicals from the creative stages just prior to opening night through the 2004 Tony Awards. The four shows are Avenue Q, Taboo, Wicked, and Caroline, or Change. The Washington Post gave the film a so-so review, but I quite enjoyed it. It did a great job of capturing the excitement, intensity, uncertainty, and camaraderie of, well, putting on a show.

(But what does it mean for someone like me -- who has written a review or two of various types in my day -- that the most annoying people in the movie were the tableful of New York critics? These particular people were insular, bitchy, self-important, and . . . kinda pinched. I found it interesting that that the more prestigious critics, Ben Brantley of the New York Times and John Lahr of the New Yorker, excellent writers both, were interviewed separately -- at their own request, I wonder? -- and weren't half as irritating.)

The only one of the four musicals I've seen is Caroline, or Change, which is powerful, moving, and highly original. I saw it in 2003 at the off-Broadway Public Theater before it went uptown -- a stage of its development (and success) that the movie strangely ignores.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the documentary is seeing the novice composer and lyricist of Avenue Q, who remain unaffected, wide-eyed, appreciative, and sweet throughout their odyssey, culminating in the Tony Award for best musical. Here's hoping they remain so. I'd like to see their show.

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I have an ambivalent relationship with musicals. My interest is still more anthropological -- both toward their aficionados and their practitioners -- than truly passionate (with some notable, and very personal, exceptions).

A dozen years ago, I published an essay that explored this very topic. I described how, as I kid, I lip-synched along to records of musicals and danced around the living room when the rest of the family was out. Then, in time, I began to suppress all of that as I approached puberty and started to have fearful clues that I was a homo. As I grew into a openly gay man -- who might have finally celebrated this fabulous side of himself -- I realized that the "musical queen" in me was buried so far down that he barely existed anymore.

The opening of my essay describes me as an adult visiting a Greenwich Village piano bar with a friend. Everyone in the place is singing along to Sondheim and other musical numbers that I don't have a clue about. Later in the essay, reflecting on the boy in me who used to love musicals, I write:

But what happened to the other life -- the imagined costumes, the songs, the delicate flutter of a hand or the strong crescendo-lash of an arm before a mirror . . . ? It died. And I don’t actively miss it, except for those times when I realize how much a part of me it once was. Then I get the strange feeling that it misses me.

Well, twelve years down the road, I have to say that the queen is climbing his way up again from the darkness. He does miss me -- I was right about that! And I find myself reaching toward him a little bit from my end. I even saw a Sondheim show a few years ago.

Like someone who receives an e-mail from a childhood friend who suggests getting together for a cup of coffee, I've been more and more game to catch up. It's true that it's hard to reignite those long-ago friendships -- so much water under the bridge and all. But you never know.