Let's Hear it for the "Boy"!

Okay, so the bank account has just taken a serious sucker-punch, I'm about to collapse from exhaustion at work, and every system in my body feels like it's taking its cue from AEA and threatening to walk out on me, but that's all fine. Y'see, The Lovely Wife(tm) and myself took my mother-in-law and her husband out to dinner and to see The Boy from Oz last night, followed by TLW and I spending a delightful couple of post-theater hours at the cast party.

Oz barely counts as a show: a bunch of creaky Peter Allen tuners, staged on one of the ugliest sets in recent memory, depicting a life that quite frankly didn't have all that much dramatic to depict, or at least not one that we haven't seen a million times before (poor boy makes it big and dies young). The show does, however, have a not-remotely-secret weapon: a charismatic quadruple-threat star with enough megawattage talent to blow the lid off the Imperial theatre at regularly spaced intervals. As I mentioned recently, Hugh Jackman deserves to have a star vehicle written for him every season. We're gonna lose him to the movies for the next few years, so maybe some writers can start working on something for him now, so that he'll have something to come back to in 2007 or so?

While Hugh's off in Hollywood, maybe we can give Raul Esparza a new role too. We finally caught The Normal Heart on Sunday, and Larry Kramer's play/rant is still searingly powerful, almost 20 years after it first opened. The entire ensemble is wonderful, but Esparza takes Ned Weeks on a screaming, rampaging journey through the tortured world of the '80s gay community, with AIDS claiming victims on a continual basis, and the gay and straight establishment keeping their hands in their pockets and their heads in the sand. Angels in America is more artsy, and has a lot of wittier dialogue, but Heart is the real thing: political theater, raw, passionate, and gutwrenching. The final scenes, played on a stage strewn with papers, food, and spilled milk, certainly count as among the most intense moments I've ever experienced. Amazingly, hardly a single critic mentions the fact that the play takes the gay community to task as much as the more fun targets (Reagan, Koch, the Times, etc). You'll get no idea from The Times Review or from any of the blurbs on the published script. Even one of Amazon's reviewers writes:

What I (a gay man) would love to see is a drama or movie that really shows the gay community of the 70's and 80's taking most of the blame for the AIDS epidemic, instead of foisting all of the blame on ignorant public health officials or the right wing.

Did this guy read the same play I saw? Both Ned Weeks and Dr. Brookner routinely rail against the attitudes of the gay community at the time, with one of my favorite monologues featuring Ned bemoaning the gay world's refusal to stand up and let itself be acknowleged for providing the world with more than just same-gender sex.

Two amazing actors, one amazing show.