‘Pretty’ isn’t always a compliment. It can also be code for what a woman is not — sharp, ambitious, or (heaven forbid!) ‘difficult.’ In the case of Vivian Ward, who has a hit movie and a new musical named in her honor, it also means she’s…
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New Musical ‘Be More Chill’ Is Like an Incel’s Answer to ‘Mean Girls’: REVIEW
If every high school dram-com is about fitting in, each one needs something to set it apart. Mean Girls has a riotous script full of sharply drawn characters; Dear Evan Hansen has an inspired score with a vivid emotional center. Be More Chill, a fren…
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New Go-Go’s Musical ‘Head Over Heels’ Is a Goddamn Queer Delight: REVIEW
A bride’s cockamamy paternity hunt was just crazy enough to make Mamma Mia! into a smash, launching a thousand jukebox copycats. Two decades later, The Go-Go’s are taking the opposite tack — toppling the patriarchy Head Over Heels in an queer fantasi…
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Boys Will Be Boys in ‘Straight White Men’ Starring Armie Hammer and Josh Charles: REVIEW
Armie Hammer and Josh Charles are horsing around, swatting at each other and throwing shapes with abandon, as the crowd titters in delight. A frame around the Helen Hayes stage bears a plaque classifying the species on display: Straight White Men, wh…
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Jesse Tyler Ferguson Is a Gay Neo-Con in Vacant ‘Log Cabin’ Off-Broadway: REVIEW
When we first meet Log Cabin’s central foursome — two couples, one lesbian and one gay, diverse as a Benetton ad — it’s 2012 and they’re not fully, as the kids might say, “woke.” Jordan Harrison’s new play, which stars Jesse Tyler Ferguson and opened…
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Idina Menzel Opens In Off-Broadway’s ‘Skintight,’ a Daddy-Twink Romance Where ‘Hot Is Everything’: REVIEW
Calvin Klein’s much publicized but short-lived romance with an adult film star less than half his age has become ripped-from-the-tabloids fodder for a new play by Joshua Harmon. Skintight, a witty but muddled satire of cultural fixation on youth and…
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Starry Broadway Revival of ‘The Boys in the Band’ Lends Gay History a High Sheen: REVIEW
The glass house on stage at the Booth Theatre seems to suggest the most shattering wounds are often self-inflicted, its plush red interior an assurance blood will be spilled. Director Joe Mantello’s slick 50th-anniversary revival of groundbreaking ga…
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Tennessee Williams and William Inge Spark an Affair in ‘The Gentleman Caller’: REVIEW
The most thrilling moment in The Gentleman Caller, which opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre last night, finds Tennessee Williams half dressed, nimbly undoing the belt of William Inge, snaking it out of his trousers, and tossing it behind the couch — u…
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How a Masked Man Ignited the Revolution for Gay Rights in ‘217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous’: REVIEW
How do you start a civil rights movement when the rest of society thinks you’re mentally ill? It was a question facing queer people before we were even considered a community, much less one that could agitate for equal treatment. The man responsible…
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In ‘Transfers,’ a Shot at Privilege Means Reckoning with Stacked Odds: REVIEW
What do you call a second chance when you never had a first? For two young men at the heart of Transfers, Lucy Thurber’s resonant and thought-provoking new play that opened off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre last night, a special scholarship…
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