It's often noted that Gay movies do not have to be particularly good, as long as they are full of attractive men. In this, Fred M. Caruso's The Big Gay Musical does not disappoint. Not a musical itself, the movie is about two young Gay men who are playing the titular roles in a new off-Broadway musical called Adam and Steve: Just the Way God Made 'em. We see scenes from the campy musical which is in previews (in which Adam and Steve replace a postlapsarian Adam and Eve, thereby earning forever the condemnation of heterosexuals), alternated with scenes from the lives of Paul (Daniel Robinson) and Eddie (Joey Dudding).
Eddie is new to New York city, having left a religiously oppressive household- still not out to his parents and still a virgin, he is appalled to hear that his parents (Jeff Binder and Denise Cormier) will be attending opening night of the big Gay extravaganza, which he told them was more traditionally religious. Paul (who has a boyfriend) becomes a mentor to him, and Eddie loses his virginity with a trick after a night at the bars. Someone(?) tells Paul's boyfriend a lie that he's HIV positive, and the boyfriend stops calling, even after Paul goes to get tested for him. He gets advice from one of the other dancers in the show (who he apparently runs into randomly in Central Park) that he should be a slut, so he does (after singing a song about it at "Mostly Sondheim", the open mic he co-hosts at The Duplex).
Meanwhile, the Musical continues, with God placing Adam and Steve on Earth to live out oppressed Gay lives, Steve as the nephew of Patty-Maye, a Fundamentalist Preacher's wife (the hilarious Liz McCartney) - he's sent to a camp to reform Gays, where he meets Adam again, and they fall in love.
Paul's sluttiness doesn't go well once he remembers that tricks (Michael Lazar) don't cuddle, and he hires a hustler (Brent Corrigan) to do so with. Eddie tells his parents he's Gay, and they're upset. He thinks he might have HIV since he had unprotected sex with that trick from earlier in the movie, so Paul brings him to go get tested. Eddie's clean, but Paul sees slutty dancer at the clinic, in shock from having received his news. A Guy Paul's been running into all over town writes him a love song. Eddie's parents decide to see the play anyway, are transformed, in a bit of wish-fulfillment by Liz McCartney's 11 o'clock number, and greet Eddie at the stage door, all smiles.
Nothing much happens in the movie's plot aside from pretty young men moving through life. The movie's relationship to theology is a bit confused, even outside the campy musical's theme: when Eddie wonders if HIV is God's way of punishing promiscuity, Paul assures him that the universe is not deterministic in that way, though Paul later falls for the guy who points out that they've been bumping into each other "so maybe someone up there wants us together".
The musical sequences are a bit long, but that's fine since they're the best part of the movie. Celina Carvajal belts her lungs out as Eve, and everyone dances divinely (and sometimes hilariously, as when the anti-gay campers break into Fosse-style moves). Music is by Rick Crom (of Newsical: The Musical- Crom also has a recurring cameo with Caruso as two drunks at the bar- the Statler and Waldorf of Mostly Sondheim).
One of the best things about The Big Gay Musical is seeing the real New York locations and people used. Several scenes are filmed in legendary piano bar The Duplex (unlike on Will and Grace, where they name-checked it but used an L.A. set). Downtown stalwarts Kate Pazakis and Jack Aaronson are delightful as themselves, hosting "Mostly Sondheim"; Marty Thomas of Xanadu (a real-life Mostly Sondheim ex-co-host) makes an appearance in the musical as the Angel Dorothy. Steve Hayes makes a cameo as God in the musical, and Michael Musto appears as himself, driven to distraction by too much straight theatre. On the whole, the movie's innocuous and entertaining, if (perhaps unsurprisingly) a bit preachy.
