How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [70]
Sondheim, a gay man who admits that it took him until his seventies to fall in love, has come to symbolize the future of the American musical. When, in the film, he shows up at Camp Ovation in a cameo appearance, the queer kid performers go crazy—it’s as if Shaquille O’Neal had suddenly turned up at a basketball camp.
Although Sondheim’s most recent Broadway productions have been less than successful, his gay vision has forever influenced straight theater tastes. Yet, as of this writing, the revival of his dark musical Assassins is finding an enthusiastic audience. In choosing exotic material such as the story of washed-up showgirls (Follies), an Ingmar Bergman film (A Little Night Music), the coming of westerners to Japan (Pacific Overtures), or a mythic London murderer (Sweeney Todd), he pushed the envelope in mainstream theater tastes. He made audiences think and influenced later composers and lyricists, gay and straight. Jonathan Larson’s Rent, for example, owes its lineage more to Sondheim than Puccini. Sondheim created the more operatic musical, eschewing the big showstopping scores of an earlier time.
Some critics have gone so far as to say that Sondheim’s musicals are meta-musicals about homosexuality itself. He says no, and I agree with him. And yet he brings with him a certain style that is definitely post-homosexual, an effete and witty effect that hasn’t been seen much since Cole Porter. He has even succeeded in writing a poignant torch song, “Send In the Clowns,” that is seriously performed everywhere (even by folksinger Judy Collins) but has also become a camp classic.
The greatest gay playwrights of the waning days of the twentieth century—Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner— are no longer considered “gay.” Similarly, Arthur Miller is no longer considered a “Jewish” playwright, as he was in the 1950s. Sondheim and Kushner have something in common with Miller: They refuse to be confined by sexuality or ethnicity. They aspire to be American playwrights with big ideas, and they have achieved that goal.
Tony Kushner, in particular, presents a new convergence of gay and straight themes in his work. His two-part Angels in America took Broadway by storm in the early nineties. Set within a large landscape populated by gay and straight characters, and accessing themes and emotions from Christianity, Judaism, the Cold War, and the AIDS epidemic, Kushner’s epic play was a synthesis of American themes that had been left unraveled for decades. Kushner is a playwright who likes to tackle large social constructs. He helped Anna Deveare Smith arrange the material for Twilight: Los Angeles, her vivid set of monologues about the Los Angeles riots of 1992. A more recent play, Homebody/Kabul, is an eloquent examination of the differences between Western culture and a third-world Afghanistan. Caroline, or Change, an operetta about race set at the time of the Kennedy assassination, has been praised for its innovative form. No wonder The New York Times recently dubbed him “Hurricane Kushner.”
If there was any doubt that Kushner’s gay sensibility could play to straight Middle America beyond Broadway, it was disbursed by the lavish production HBO gave to Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols. Angels was the event of the Fall 2003 season, featuring true movie stars Meryl Streep, Al Pa cino, and Emma Thompson. The play, which had debuted in the spring of 1993, seemed not to have aged over a decade but rather to have deepened in its relevance. In its original subtitle, Kushner had dubbed the piece “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” The play seems less particularly gay now and more about how individuals cope with national and personal tragedy. In the aftermath of the enormous loss of 9/11, Angels became a comforting play about the strength and diversity of the American character. Here, finally, we had a gay vision, obsessed with the horrible AIDS scourge, interpreting loss and renewal in American culture.