Theater review by Raven Snook
Musical-comedy queens will gag for The Big Gay Jamboree, a cheeky send-up of the form. Failed Broadway baby Stacey (Titanique diva Marla Mindelle) wakes up with a hangover to find that she is somehow trapped inside an old-time musical. The last thing she remembers is fighting with her tech-bro boyfriend (Alex Moffat, in a variant on his Guy Who Just Bought a Boat character from Saturday Night Live); now it’s 1945 in the small town of Bareback, Idaho, where everyone constantly bursts into song and Stacey is slated to be wed to an unseen groom. As she tries to get back home, she's joined by fellow misfits, in the tradition of The Wizard of Oz: the town's lone Black guy, Clarence (a steamy Paris Nix); Flora, a BDSM Ado Annie (Natalie Walker, fierce); and dance-happy homosexual Bert (Mindelle's Titanique collaborator Constantine Rousouli, who slays with a "Music and the Mirror"–style solo).
The Big Gay Jamboree | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
The amusing pastiche score, by Mindelle and Philip Drennen, is performed with gusto by the exuberant cast, which is kept in nearly perpetual motion by director-choreographer Connor Gallagher. The parody numbers may not transcend their archetypes, but they're crowd-pleasers, particularly Nix's rousing "Gospel Song," Flora's vampy "Kitty Tickle," and "The Gay B-Cs" (a kind of "Do-Re-Mi" for modern gay slang). The bawdy book, by Mindelle and Jonathan Parks-Ramage, sparks bigger laughs. Despite its similar setup, this isn't Schmigadoon: It's way gayer. The jokes draw heavily on contemporary queer culture; it helps to be as familiar with The Real Housewives and Reneé Rapp as you are with Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Although not as inventively bonkers as Titanique, which turned Mindelle into a queer darling, The Big Gay Jamboree works as a raunchy love letter to musical comedy—and an affectionate critique of it—by four friends who clearly adore the genre. (The creators and director met while getting BFAs at Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music.) It's also a great vehicle for Mindelle, a quadruple threat who belts with abandon and smashes the fourth wall with glee. It's neither transgressive nor PC; this is comfort camp, and it’s a gay old time.
The Big Gay Jamboree. Orpheum Theater (Off Broadway). Book by Marla Mindelle and Jonathan Parks-Ramage. Songs by Mindelle and Philip Drennen. Directed by Connor Gallagher. With Mindelle, Alex Moffat, Paris Nix, Constantine Rousouli, Natalie Walker. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
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The Big Gay Jamboree | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
