Being trapped in a classic stage musical is surely someone’s idea of hell and another person’s idea of heaven. Marla Mindelle, in character and not, spends most of The Big Gay Jamboree in between, in a deliciously hilarious, very contradictory kind of purgatory. Musicals, the show asserts — and especially the ones of the kind you find yourself auditioning for when you’ve got a BFA in theater — are flawed, corny, deeply stupid objects, yet we love them anyway, despite their flaws but also because of them. The same goes for The Big Gay Jamboree itself, which is often flawed, corny, and deeply stupid, and wins you over with its warm embrace of the form it has set out to parody. The sheer force of Mindelle’s commitment to the bit, so to speak, redeems all.
The show sets its premise within the first few lines of the opening song: Mindelle’s character, a struggling actresses named Stacey whose most notable credit was in a show about the nutritional value of zucchini, wakes up after a bender to find herself living in the 1940s among the good people of “Bareback, Idaho.” Her sisters, whom she does not recognize, are all aflurry, in the mode of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, preparing her for her wedding day, while she stumbles around mumbling about how her last memories before this moment in involve her tech-bro boyfriend (Alex Moffat, isolated among the cast considering he’s coming from a comedy-comedy background and not a musical-comedy one; the disjunction works) announcing that he’d gotten her tickets to see Reneé Rapp at a Hard Rock Café. You may immediately notice that Big Gay Jamboree’s conceit of modern person falling backward into a classic musical is nearly the same as in Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon, but in all fairness, the idea of contrasting the rosy world of song and dance fantasy and actual reality is as old as the form (you can cite everything from Follies to The Drowsy Chaperone to the musical episode of Buffy to Brigadoon itself). Mindelle and her co-writer, Jonathan Park-Ramage, differentiates their work from the pack by being as filthy as possible — brace yourself for the town of Bareback’s anthem — and stuffing itself with niche references aimed at those of us whose brains have been poisoned by prolonged exposure to theater people. Among the more obvious pulls, like a barricade that resembles the one from Les Miz, a gospel number for the town’s only Black man (Paris Nix), and a choreographic send-up of “The Music and the Mirror,” the show gets in a stray tribute to Jason Robert Brown, as Stacey’s retelling of her romance with her boyfriend ends with “I’ll never have the moon,” and Mindelle applies her capable belt to a song (the generally toe-tapping music is by Mindelle and Philip Drennen) “in the style of contemporary musical theater” that baffles her old-timey sisters and would blend right within the oeuvre of Tom Kitt.
The pop-culture references aren’t all just musical, mind you. The latter half of the show becomes increasingly preoccupied with the bad career decisions of Jennifer Lopez, as well as a send-up of a fictional J.Lo biomusical that doesn’t not resemble Hell’s Kitchen — all, I assume, because the idea of Stacey being cast in the role of “The Block” (as in “Jenny From the …”) made Mindelle and Parks-Ramage laugh.
The show inevitably hangs on Mindelle, who seems as baffled and delighted as anyone that people are letting her get away with this. Before creating The Big Gay Jamboree, she became something of a cult star playing a daffy Céline Dion in the way Off Broadway (as in, underneath a Gristedes) hit Titanique, a send-up of the James Cameron film she created with her friend Constantine Rousouli. (He returns in Big Gay as Bareback’s ostracized gay resident.) Titanique started in L.A., where Mindelle herself had relocated after quitting a fitfully successful musical-theater career of her own in New York. It has since gathered enough momentum to sustain an open-ended run Off Broadway run as well as expeditions to London, Toronto, Sydney, and of course, Montreal. Its success clearly got producers interested in giving Mindelle a bigger budget and letting her run wild. The Big Gay Jamboree was, originally, a film script she and Parks-Ramage sold in 2019 (to Margot Robbie’s production company, as it turns out) during Mindelle’s time on the West Coast, now ressurected from development hell and brought to life onstage. The Big Gay Jamboree may lack Titanique’s sense of DIY creativity — it has a Thomas Kinkade–esque set by the ubiquitous design firm dots and tearaway-heavy costumes by Sarah Cubbage — but it retains some of those rough-hewn charms, falling somewhere between a Rusical and a college-thesis project that got out of hand. If we lost Mindelle to Los Angeles briefly, it’s good, for New York’s sake, that we dragged her back onstage, because she’s an ace at working a room. During my performance, Mindelle, in character as Stacey, asked a woman in the crowd if she could use her phone to call a friend for help, and that audience member’s friend turned out to be in a McDonald’s parking lot. Momentarily distracted from her quest, Mindelle asked what the friend had gotten to eat and then hung up, in disappointment, after learning that they hadn’t picked up a milkshake — “terrible order!”
The Big Gay Jamboree is best during those flights of absurdity. It tends to sag when it plays the hits. In this case, the median is a stream of jokes about gay life that delight an audience with a supermajority of gay men but never cut deeper than the kind of thing that you might find on bad Instagram meme account: Bottoms love Britney Spears, gay couples try to ignore the problems in their relationships by chasing a third, crazy things happen in the Equinox steam room. The jokes get a laugh, as does a “Do Re Mi” parody that involves “Dick,” “Serve,” “yas,” “twerk,” “PrEP,” and more, but at the cost of making this all hackier than it could be. (Unfortunately, you can also buy a tote bag at the merch stand with all those words on it.) You’d hope there would be more precision to Mindelle and Parks-Ramage’s send-up of classic musicals, too. There’s a lot of broad gesturing at how backward those sunny old musicals could be, without as much wrestling with the ways those same shows could be shadowy, politically complex, and ahead of their time. (Remember that Oklahoma! revival?) As far as The Big Gay Jamboree gets is acknowledging that there were a lot of boots-down bottoms behind the scenes trying their best to pretend to understand how to write straight people.
But what won me over was Mindelle’s irrepressible love of the form, as much as The Big Gay Jamboree may mock it. As she tours around Bareback like Dorothy in Oz, Stacey collects a trio of outcasts that includes Rousouli’s woodsman, Nix’s choir teacher, and a perpetually horny sister played by Natalie Walker. Walker (whom I know; she’s written for New York) gives a delirious performance that’s as if Madeline Kahn were cast as Marilyn Monroe in Smash, with a solo number where she purrs “boys!” to ensemble members as she sings about how BDSM turns out to be a girl’s best friend. In moments like that, Walker’s character might be miming about fisting, but The Big Gay Jamboree’s heart is on its sleeve. Of course, Stacey is eventually going to fall in love with the people of Bareback, and of course she is never going to give up that acting career for a cozy life with the terrible tech boyfriend. How could she, when musicals are this fun?
The Big Gay Jamboree is at the Orpheum Theatre.
Related
