How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [69]
Kenrick consults with museums about musical-theater exhibits. He also runs a website, Musicals101.com, which is the most comprehensive site about Broadway I’ve ever encountered. It was from Kenrick that I learned, with the source verified, that Winston Churchill had once slept with Ivor Novello, a gay English matinee idol. When asked how it was, Churchill said, “Very musical!”
Kenrick points out that “the Broadway musical and the term ‘homosexuality’ were invented almost simultaneously.” The year was 1866, when a lively play, The Black Crook, debuted in New York. That same year, the German Karl Ulrichs publicly defined his attraction to his own sex as “urning,” and a year later, also in Germany, the term “homosexual” appeared in print for the first time. “A coincidence,” says John Kenrick, “but one that theater queens can delight in.”
I’m interested in dramatic and musical watersheds. It’s great to think about what strides were being made, say, in the 1970s, with musicals such as A Chorus Line featuring gay characters and gay situations. And The Boys in the Band was a totally gay play, even if it did succumb to some very negative gay stereotypes. Yet in terms of how gay composers and playwrights affected straight America, I’m much more interested in the musicals written and produced by closeted gay men in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Men such as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim changed the direction of the American musical forever. In works such as Candide, West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, and Follies, they recreated the American musical as a fluid, socially conscious art form with realistic characters and choreography that incorporated dance techniques from different cultures. Entire books have been written about the genesis of West Side Story, a 1959 gay collaboration that seemed made in heaven. The homosexual actor Montgomery Clift had asked Jerome Robbins how he might best play a Hispanic Romeo in a film he was considering; from that small question came the idea for writing a musical based on Romeo and Juliet and yet set amid the backdrop of a gang-infested Puerto Rican neighborhood in contemporary New York. Bernstein wrote the soaring melodies for songs that have become romantic standards (“Somewhere,” “Tonight”), as well as novelty numbers that sounded as if they had been overheard on the streets (“Officer Krupke,” “In America”). Sondheim and Laurents supplied the hip lyrics and book, while Robbins provided the liveliest, most street-wise choreography ever seen on Broadway.
As usual, the gay collaborators were well ahead of their time: Theater scholars point out that West Side Story lost out in the Tony Awards to The Music Man, a much more conventional show. Yet the gay sensibility that shaped West Side Story would in the end begin to pervade the mainstream Broadway show. Stephen Sondheim has always bristled when asked if “Somewhere” is truly a gay song about the yearning to belong. Yet the song has become an anthem for gay pride, in part, I think, because the sense of alienation so vital to the gay aesthetic practically oozes from West Side Story. In the history of the theater, this show, with its poignant songs of longing and rebellion, is the first moment when the gay vision addressed another alienated group: the youth of a prejudiced America.
Stephen and Tony and Mainstream American Theater
The wonderful 2003 teen movie Camp opens as summer theater students board the bus for Camp Ovation, an upstate New York outpost where they will star in musicals and plays. In a deliciously comic riff, the campers on the bus begin singing the torch song “Losing My Mind,” from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. In scene after scene, the movie features mostly gay boys and ugly-duckling girls singing Sondheim songs way