aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Like children’s theater for 40-year-old gay people

Xanadu on Broadway was everything I hoped for and more (seriously) packed into 90 intermission free minutes of frothy fun.

I was in the audience on what was to have been opening night.  As it turned out, the opening of the stage musical version of the mega-flop movie was delayed when lead James Carpinello (recently of Saturday Night Fever) suffered a foot injury. The opening is now scheduled for July 11.

Cheyenne Jackson stepped into the role of the frustrated record album cover artist named Sonny who is inspired by the nine muses of ancient Greece to fulfill that greatest of artistic achievements - a roller disco.  “My heart goes out to [Carpinello]...I am honored to borrow his skates.”

Jackson, whose Sonny was buff toothy innocence and terrific, was previously in the off-Broadway musical Altar Boyz that I so thoroughly enjoyed but he may more broadly be known as the openly-gay actor who played gay hero Mark Bingham, one of the real-life characters in the Oscar-nominated film United 93.

His muse, Kira/Clio, is played by Kerry Butler who created the role of Penny Pingleton in Hairspray (the last show on Broadway I saw before moving down to Georgia). She was more recently on Broadway as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. I saw her years ago off-Braodway as Shelley in the cult hit (and personal favorite) Batboy: the Musical.

James Wolcott, who enjoyed the show every bit as much as I did - “It was like taking Ecstasy in Broadway ticket form” - says of Butler:

She is a flowing vision on roller skates, a blonde creamy confection of Olivia Newton-John, the divine Kyle Minogue, and Sarah Michelle-Gellar. She does things to vowels with her mock-Australian accent that should earn her a birdbath perch on musical-comedy Mt. Olympus. I truly, truly dug what she was doing, and I shall now pause to run a comb through my hair.

Wolcott points to another Xanadu convert at NYC Stories:

Xanadu is one of the funniest things to land on a Broadway stage in ages.  I laughed and groaned from beginning to end.  This show is far far over the top.  It might even be over the top’s top, but luckily it knows it and knows just what to do with that material to make an audience laugh.  This super campy production is about the only thing that could have been done with the movie to make it work on the stage… See the show now, as it will probably have a hard time hanging on for long.  It might just prove to be too gay for Broadway. Then again, you never know.  It could turn out to be the smash hit of 2007.

Tony Roberts as Danny and Jackie Hoffman and Mary Testa as the evil Muses also merit mention, but the entire ensemble cast is a joy to behold. If you’re in town, see it!