Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden

Author:Ethan Mordden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Nanette version was:

Q: How many straight Broadway chorus boys does it take to replace a lightbulb?

A: Both of them.

Another revival, of Kismet, in a black-cast revision called Timbuktu! (1978), added a new Big Lady to the list, Eartha Kitt. She had been prominent for over a generation, since her breakout debut in New Faces Of 1952. But only now did she really make it to top stardom, as she was difficult to cast except in exotic parts (such as Batman’s Catwoman) and was personally belligerent with everybody from co-stars to interviewers.

However, she was also courageous, and in 1968 she spoke against the Vietnam War and our soldiers being “sent off to be shot and maimed.” This was at a White House luncheon hosted by First Lady Mrs. Johnson, and the enraged authorities compiled a dossier of scandals about Kitt’s personal life, in an instance of cancel culture avant la lettre. Kitt was forced to seek work abroad, so Timbuktu! marked her return to American show biz.

She is of interest herein because her alluring stage presence seems to speak directly to gays with her trilling, elongated vowels and playfully overdone takes. Her entrance in Timbuktu! was a study in lazy insolence, as she prowled downstage, surveyed the auditorium of the Mark Hellinger Theatre, and, like a Roman grandee visiting the gladiators’ quarters, asked, “Anyone new in town?” Later, when told that her (villainous) husband was dead and she was now a widow, she cried, “Aaaaa . . . wiiiiidoooow?” as she deftly fainted into a man’s arms with her left hand fluttering outward and her right shielding her brow with vast delicacy. It stopped the show every time.

Speaking of musicals not precisely gay yet not precisely straight either, Chicago and A Chorus Line appeared back-to-back in 1975 as dueling high-maestro exhibitions of, respectively, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett. Each show had a gay character, though Chicago’s prison Matron was never explicitly a lesbian, even if shyster lawyer Jerry Orbach called her “Butch” (and the Chicago movie accented the Matron’s interest in young women). Orbach also called a tailor a “dumb fruit” when he accidentally stuck Orbach with a pin, but in fact Chicago was a pro-gay show in general, with a score by Kander and Ebb (though Ebb was never officially out) and a number of gay creatives, including both producers.

The gayest of all, as I’ve said, was Bob Fosse, straight but a major docent in the academy of fabulous in the way he moved his dancers, in the erotic character of his stagings, in his worship of the crazed deities of show biz—Delicia, Transvesto, Orgasmo. True, Fosse didn’t focus on shirtless hunks in the Joshua Logan manner. Still, his chorus men gave off a whiff of homosocial welcome, and the women were physically intense—and Fosse didn’t have Logan’s casting luxury, because Fosse’s choreography called for dancing expertise above all. Logan could hire a chorus of bodybuilders for All American’s aforementioned locker-room scene and to fill out their cheerleader jerseys

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