The Boys in the Band Broadway Reviews

I wish I could report that this charismatic and capable team, directed by the busy Joe Mantello, transported me vividly and uncompromisingly into the dark ages of homosexual life in these United States, and that I shuddered and sobbed in sympathy. But even trimmed from two acts to an intermission-free 110 minutes, the show left me largely impatient and unmoved.

Mantello wants his audience to breathe in not just his characters, with their one-liners, quips, power trips and deep sadness, but also to imbue the breathtaking contrast with the self-assured men who now are playing them, luckier men not born when the play was written. That is not to imply condescension on the part of these actors - on the contrary, for you can read the seriousness with which they take their assignments to play men much less famous than themselves - but merely to claim Mantello's clear purpose, as intensified by a design from David Zinn that has one foot in two eras and its cleverly timeless body in the close proximity of such contradictions as intimacy and performance, privacy and display.

Like the musical 'Hair,' 'The Boys in the Band' is very much a product of its time. Had it premiered just a year later following the Stonewall Riots, Crowley may have made his characters more defiant and less self-loathing in nature. Yet even if the play is dated and its shock value has worn off, as this crowd-pleasing revival demonstrates, it can still be a powerful piece of theater.

To some degree, at least, we seem to have learned. The keen-edged and engrossing 50th-anniversary revival of The Boys in the Band-which is also the play's Broadway debut-is the creation of five openly gay producers, an openly gay director (the redoubtable Joe Mantello) and nine openly gay actors. No one seems worried about being role models; they focus on their roles, and on Crowley's favorful dialogue, whose basic bitterness is frequently cut with acid.

'Inspired' is the word for casting Jim Parsons as Michael, the vitriolic host of a totally misbegotten birthday party. Equally fortuitous is getting Joe Mantello to direct the first Broadway revival of Mart Crowley's 'The Boys in the Band,' which opened Thursday at the Booth Theatre, half a century after its Off Broadway world premiere in 1968.

Fifty years after Mart Crowley's landmark comic drama about a group of gay men in pre-Stonewall New York first made waves, director Joe Mantello vigorously shakes the dust off The Boys in the Band. What might have been another bulletin from the distant queer past is transformed into a scintillating portrait of the self-loathing that festers in ghettoized subcultures, perhaps as much now as then. Starring a high-caliber cast of out gay actors led by Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells, the production is sharpest when the zingers are flying back and forth like missiles, but the anger coursing through the play's veins still scalds.

Festivities are certainly in order for this superbly mounted 50th anniversary production of 'The Boys in the Band,' Mart Crowley's breakthrough 1968 play about Manhattan gay life - still largely underground in an era that preceded both Stonewall and AIDS.

Through it all, the ensemble filled with out-and-proud actors is uniformly terrific. They deftly hug the curves of the script as it goes from barbed humor to bile-spewing. To his credit Crowley doesn't tie things up with a bow. 'Call you tomorrow,' says Harold, after the carnage. In other words, boys will be boys.

That painful declaration, spoken by Michael (Jim Parsons) near the end of the 50th anniversary revival of Mart Crowley's 'The Boys in the Band' at the Booth Theatre, comes close to saying it all. The rest is bitter, biting exposition.

From the beginning, Boys has been criticized for catering to some of the deepest and most damaging stereotypes of gay life: the nelly, the show queen, the self-loathing closet case. Certain facets do feel dated, but to scrub them entirely would also feel like a denial of the truths and the time the play is rooted in. And for all the pop-culture asides and pointed wit, it's hardly a hollow platform for banter and bitcheries; director Joe Mantello (Wicked, the original production of Angels in America) takes care to let his characters' messier humanity come through.

Boys is a historical marker, a fascinating night in with a group of imperfect buddies, a dark night of the soul, and-in Mantello's supple charge-an exhilarating, investigatory night of many souls.

Because director Joe Mantello, a production team that includes Ryan Murphy and Scott Rudin, and a cast led by the full-of-surprises Jim Parsons as well as Zachary Quinto and Matt Bomer, have revived and revitalized a play that for all its imperfections throws a party at the Booth Theatre that shouldn't be missed.

There are surely things to be enthusiastic about in Joe Mantello's glitzy, solidly acted revival, perhaps most of all the commitment of its producers, David Stone and the seemingly omnipotent Ryan Murphy, to assembling a complete cast of openly gay actors, a feat that would have been impossible when the original production shocked and captivated New York a year before Stonewall.

Newspaper ads during the play's original run boasted quotes like 'Screamingly Funny,' and 'Lancing Wit,' perhaps luring in hesitant straight ticket-buyers with the promise of a jolly comedy rather than witnessing the self-reflections of members of a group their society has marginalized. While Mantello's immensely engaging production certainly isn't stingy with the laughs, the director also has the liberty to play to a more sympathetic public, allowing the sharp edges to occasionally soften, giving clearer views of what all that laughter was hiding.

Seen from some vantages, it's all rainbow flags and smiley faces. The US has achieved marriage equality, for now anyway, and many people who don't identify as heterosexual no longer feel compelled to closet themselves. Aids, which postdates this play, but seems to be prefigured in its discussion of the bathhouses and an analyst who couldn't make a session because of 'a virus or something, he looked awful', continues to transform from a terminal illness into a chronic one. One of the play's producers, Ryan Murphy, an openly gay man, is pretty much the hottest thing in entertainment and the play's cast is made up mostly if not entirely of openly gay actors, including Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells, a thing unimaginable even a few decades ago. The actors are doing strong work, though a few of them keep signaling just how strong that work is.