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Thinking outrageously I write in cursive I hide in my bed with the lights on the floor hello all you theater lovers both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history und legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And you might be wondering, oh, we got a little bonus episode today, just so soon after Matt started the Grab Back series with South Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Why, yes, we did. Because first of all, we have some things to review. We saw Yellowface on Broadway. We saw the Big Gay Jamboree at the Orpheum. We saw Grounded at the Met, and we also had some pretty bitter news throughout this week. And I wanted to sort of talk about it for a little bit, mostly for my own sanity, but in case anybody wants to listen through these emotions and thoughts and whatnot, you know, here's your chance. So the first half will be reviews and then the second half will be our I can't even say discussion. There's no one else on the mic with me, but I guess my rambling monologue, one might say similar to BoJack Horseman's 25 minute monologue episode in when I think in season six when his mother passes and he basically just like does the entire episode talking to a crowd at his mother's funeral. I think it's called Free Burrito. That's the name of the episode. Anyway, just so you know, that's sort of what we've got going on today. And I also want to say I'm recording this Tuesday, October 1st. So it's been 48 hours since the Chad Beglin episode dropped, where I also discussed my play and had a link for a donation so we could raise money to do a proper reading of my play for the live stream that we're doing in November. And I just want to say a quick thank you to everyone who's donated so far. We've had nine donations so far totaling up to almost $600, which is incredible. You are all very generous. I appreciate it so much. So I just want to say a quick thank you to Anna and Jake, to Tara, thank you for your note as well, Tara. I'm so happy that you're happy to support me. To Michael Rodrigo, to Gian Donato, I'm so sorry if I messed up your name there. To Jerry, to David, to Karen. David, thank you for your note as well. And I'm glad you're excited for the play. If you haven't donated yet and you know intend to if you forgot or are putting it off, I'm going to put the link back in the description for this episode as well. If you are waiting to be able to afford to donate, that's absolutely fine. If you have no intention of donating, also fine. I would appreciate it though. It absolutely would help. If you don't think that any bit helps, it really does. Again, with only nine donations we have have almost $600 that is. And in 48 hours no less. So I am feeling very moved by that. I know Tyler, my friend Tyler Milian who is co producing and helping us sort of organize this live stream. He's the contracted connection we have with streaming musicals. He's very impressed by the haul so far. He was like all you've done is announce it on the podcast and done what he calls a soft push. And he said this is a really amazing haul to get so far. So he finds it very encouraging. You should find it encouraging. And again, thank you for your generosity and your time. Anyone else who intends to be generous with their time and their pocketbook, I'll leave the link for you now. That's all that is on that. I'll now move on to reviews. I know that I tend to babble and I've had people respond that I do too much housekeeping. So let's get to the nitty gritty of it all. We we saw some shows recently. We saw Yellowface on Broadway thanks to our press seats with Polk press representatives. We also saw Big Gay Jamboree and we also saw Grounded at the Met. I'll start with Grounded, just to get it quickly out of the way, because the truth is that we only saw half of Grounded at the Met. My mother and I went together. Grounded, for those of you who don't know, is a new Janine Tesori opera that debuted at the Met this fall. It's the first opera written by a woman to open the season, I believe, and one of the few operas that the Met has commissioned a female composer to write. This is not Tesori's first opera. She also has Blue. She has two other operas as well, although their names escape me. And this is based off of the stage play by George Brandt, which some of you might remember being performed at the Public Theater many years ago starring Anne Hathaway. Directed by Julie Taymor. It was a one woman show. Still is a one woman show about a fighter pilot who gets pregnant after a one night stand and marries her one night stand and chooses to have the baby, which keeps her out of the flying game. Something that she's really, really passionate about. And eventually she comes back to it about five years later. But now she is a captain of drones. She's no longer flying in person. She's flying from the command center. And in some ways this is really great because she can still have a home life. She can go see her daughter every night. She's not on assignment all the time. She's also not risking her life in a plane. She is in the safety of a control room on the other end of things. With these drones, it can feel very impersonal, but the clarity of picture is such that you are always aware of who you are going to be shooting at, where you, what you are blowing up, who you might be hurting when you're blowing things up. And so there's a moral quandary with all of this. Now I know how the play ends. I think the original play is about 85 minutes with no intermission. And again, it's a one woman piece. And while she's flying the drone, she's having flashbacks to when she met her husband and having her daughter and having to drop out of flying and coming back and all these other things and then her own moral quandaries and then ultimately disobeying orders at the end of the play with a drone strike she's supposed to do for her because of her own moral conflictions. Now the opera, my mom and I went to go because we, we wanted to go because we were very interested in it. As we, we all know. I'm a huge nin tesori, honestly whore. I love the woman. I think that she's one of the most versatile and influential and just talented composers we have working right now in any medium but musical theater specifically. And I was very excited to see her opera. And now opera's not like my forte. It's not something that I'm very well versed in, despite the fact that I'm obsessed with the movie Amadeus and I do not have an in depth knowledge of it. I know some stuff. I've seen a couple of operas, though never at the Met. I've only ever been to the Met for ballet, but I've seen La Boheme, I've seen Hansel and Gretel. Interestingly enough, that was designed by Maurice Sendak at Juilliard back in the day. I've seen a couple of operas. I'm aware of certain operas, I know certain tunes from certain operas. But I've never been a savant of it. I've never had encyclopedic knowledge. But I did reach out to a couple of my friends who are big opera buffs afterwards because at intermission my mom and I looked at each other and were like, I'm not really enjoying this. There are things about it to enjoy. I don't hate this, but I don't love it. It's not compelling enough to me. It's kind of slow. And you know, we were all the way up in the family circle, which is essentially the nosebleed. So we had a great view of the entire massive stage and design. The production is directed by Michael Mayer, designed by Mimi Lien. And the sound was good. We heard the orchestra crystal clear. The they are unamplified voices, so they were not necessarily booming into our faces. But we did hear the voice as well. We did have to rely on the subtitles on our chairs to make out the words. Sometimes, even though it is sung in English, it's just you're far away and you're overcoming a lot of sound to make out all of the words. And the two things that really kind of, I guess three things that really kept us from really enjoying it. One was it felt a bit slow, A lot bit slow I would actually say, which makes sense. This was an 80, 85 minute one woman show that has been turned into a two hour plus opera, including a 30 minute intermission. So the whole evening actually would be about 2 hours and 40. And of course the cast has been expanded. All the characters that are spoken of in the play are real characters in the opera. And there is a whole chorus of male singers, of fighter pilots. And Tesori is incapable of having a whole evening of music. And not having some of her compositions be beautiful. That's just. It's in one hour of music. There are moments where you just sit there and you go, that was beautiful, that was lovely. Or that was exciting. There are actually interesting passages in the first act where some of her score is reminiscent of Copeland. Very Americana, heavy strings, Semi Oklahoma Y. But there was a lot of dissonant music in a way that felt. And I hate to say this about her because as we all know, I love her so dearly, but it felt a little try hard of sort of, this is opera. We are at the Met. And so this has to feel much more artistic and avant garde. It just didn't sound natural to what she normally does. She's often so good at writing music that is actable, that is dramatic that is appropriate to the character and the situation that the story is in. And there are moments in Grounded, at least in the first act, where we get that. But there was a lot where it's more sort of sounded to me and to my mother where it sounded as if it was Tesori going, well, this is opera. What it's supposed to sound like? And I had asked my friends who are very deep in the opera world, and I said, what's sort of the story of modern operas? How do people feel about them? And I won't say their names because a couple of them have actually been guests on this podcast over the last six years. And they all said. They all went, oh, opera fans hate modern operas. It's very rare to find one that people enjoy. And if there's one that is mostly enjoyed, you'll find a fraction of a section of that fan base that is equally hating it. I think Nixon in China was one that was listed as sort of, oh, that one has its fans. There was another one in the 50s that a friend told me that sort of has its fans. But ultimately, in the last, like, 60, 70 years, there haven't really been a lot of operas that have been welcomed. Even the Hours, which I know is a huge ticket and you couldn't get in. No one, from what I understand, who all saw it, enjoyed it. They all reported back to me and said, oh, Kelly sounds gorgeous and Rene sounds lovely, but, like, the opera itself is not very good. And so Jeanine Tesori's opera not being super well received. And you can also read the New York Times review for it, which I did as well. And they were positive on the first act, more so than I was. But that's because they had seen its premiere a year earlier in D.C. and they said they've done a lot of great work on the first act. They've cut it by, like 20 minutes. It's a lot tighter. It's a little more exciting, but it still doesn't totally work. And then the second act is where they said it all sort of falls apart. So if my mom and I were not super enjoying the first act, chances are we were not going to like the second act anymore. But they said, you know, it feels a little tryharded, feels a little bit of a slog. And so I felt a little justified in that as someone who is a neophyte to this world and was trying to come at it with respect and at arm's length without saying, like, oh, yeah, I know everything, but more sort of this is my natural reaction to what I'm watching. So it gave me a little justification for all of that. As we all know, Tesori is a brilliant composer. Just listen to Caroline or Change or Violet or Fun Home. All of her new stuff for Millie and how beautifully that blends into previously written works like the Woman has an Ear. And I would like to listen to some of her other operatic compositions just to see what that's like, because I understand Blue was better received than this, and it's a shame. But some other positives. The. You know, my mom was really big fan of the design. I wasn't really, but it was impressive. The two leads of the piece. Emily d' Angelo as Jess sounded really thrilling. And then Ben Bliss as her husband was phenomenal. Her husband Eric, he was incredible. We loved his voice. And I wasn't sure if that was a bad take or not because he didn't sound incredibly operatic. He's a tenor. But he sounded much more like a classically trained Broadway singer than a full blown operatic tenor. You know, he had this warm, lush tone to his voice that was very smooth and very enjoyable. And so my mom and I were thinking to each other, are we basic for thinking that he's the best voice in the show? But then I asked my opera friends, they said, no, no, no. He. I guess he did Rigoletto recently or he did La Traviata. He did an opera last year that. Where apparently he just blew the roof off the place. So at the very least, my mom and I aren't total bum fucks about this. The other thing that my mom really had issues with, and I did too, was by it being a modern opera in English about people who curse a lot. A lot of the recitative sounded off because they would sing things like fuck and shit, and like, oh, what the fuck and I'm freaking out and holy shit and things like that. Or like, you asshole, things like that. But with the timbre of opera. Operatic singing, operatic music. And again, very. Not Janine Tesori natural operatic music. It felt all very put upon. So the whole thing just kind of clashed with the lyrics and the music that way. It gave me very Jerry Springer the opera vibes where that contrast is sort of the point. In Jerry Springer the opera, it's meant played for humor. And there are times when it's played for humor in grounded. But then other times where I didn't think certain scenes were meant to have that comedic break in it and audiences still laughed anyway just because of that contrast of that juxtaposition of the two and after a while just became grating. If it was sparingly used for comedic purposes, I think I would have been more okay with it. But then they tried to have your ear adjust to it. It and it just, it sounded off. It really sounded off. And as I said, it gave me Jerry Springer the opera vibes. So I can't say that I totally recommend it. But if you are interested, by all means go see it. But I can only really talk about Act 1. I can't talk about the whole piece. Anyway, moving on. We have the Big Gay Jamboree which is currently in previews at the Orpheum Theater. I believe when this comes out over the weekend it will finally have its opening night. They had to push it back due to illness in the cast. Big Gay Jamboree is the follow up to Titanique by Marla Mandel and I don't think any of her other creators from Titanique are on the production team for this show. Philip Drennan, Jonathan Parks Ramage. I don't think any of them worked on Titanique. I know the director, Conor Gallagher, didn't work on Titanique. That was Ty Blue and I'm not entirely sure why Ty didn't work on this. But Constantine Rasooli, who if you saw Titanique, he was Jack and one of the co writers of that show as well, he is in Big Gay Jamboree and there are a couple of other cast members in Big Gay Jamboree who were in Titanique. So there's a nice crossover there. Big Gay Jamboree in a nutshell, without giving away too much because there's a lot to over explain and it's a comedy and the whole point of comedy is the element of surprise. So I don't want anyone going knowing too much about it with the risk of losing their great time. But it's sort of Schmigadoon meets like a little bit of Pleasantville and a little bit of I guess McNeil, the Al Pacino movie Simone about artificial intelligence and simulation and whatnot. The main gist is that Marlon Mandel's character, who is a straight woman, wakes up and finds herself in a musical and it's right after she thought she was going to be getting engaged to her longtime boyfriend. And the whole musical is centered around her with all these characters who seem to know her and her whole backstory, at least her backstory in this musical because she wakes up in this musical town and it's her wedding day. But it's not like Schmigadoon, where it's a real place. She is on a stage in front of an audience. She can see everything. And there seems to be a dark undertone to everything that's happening. There seems to be some conspiracy going on. And that's all I'll say about that. I had a fun time at Big Gay Jambry. I was really expecting it to kind of blow my socks off, and it didn't. I don't think it's a terribly good show. It is funny, and by that metric it succeeds because it does just sort of want to be a dumb time. But I mentioned this with Titanique, about a show that I think is very brilliant about being dumb and clever at the same time. Part of that is because Titanique is following the plot structure and story of Titanic, which is, say what you will, that movie is storyboarded incredibly well with all of its characters and tricking you into hoping that the ship doesn't sink, even though you know it's going to, and caring about the characters and all of that. And by having that to go off of, it allows all the creators of Titanique to just sort of run free with their crazy ideas and their silliness and including banger songs from the Celine Dion catalog that are arranged incredibly well. Big Gay Jamboree is a much bigger swing. It's a lot more throwing spaghetti at the wall. I think I described it to my friend afterwards as like if Bridesmaids was the guarantor for Kristen Wiig and Annie. I'm blanking on her last name, but her best friend, co writer on Bridesmaids, and they got an Oscar nomination for that screenplay and it was this huge financial hit. Annie, Momelo, Mumolo. I don't know how you say that name, but if that was sort of their guarantor, then Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was their blank check, where they just sort of did whatever they wanted. They got carte blanche. And that movie is bonkers. It's hilarious, but it's bonkers. So Big Gay Jamboree is sort of Marlo Mindel and team's Barb and Star in a lot of ways, which is a very compelling endorsement. But that's more me saying it's truly them just throwing everything out there and seeing what sticks, I suppose. I don't think there's a lot of structure to it. There's not a lot of continuity, which, you know, you don't have to have all that if you're just trying to be a dumb, dumb time. But it does sort of separate the wheat from the chaff that way. Right. Like, you know, there are some shows that are fun time but are also very well structured and have immense payoff and really think things through and thus last for a long time and make you want to come back to it. We'll talk about this when we record that episode later. But Little Shop of Horrors is a show that really is just trying to be a fun time and just so happens to be a perfectly structured musical that is nearly indestructible, and it's why it has remained evergreen all these years. Something like Noise is Off, which is truly just a silly show about the insanity of theater, but has lasted all these years because it is just so well done. Big A Jambry has a lot of interesting ideas and fun moments, but ultimately, I think it is. And it's also, I gotta say, it is beautifully designed. It is very well staged. I think Conor Gallagher's staging and choreography is very impressive. It's tight. It's not too much. It's very funny. It's very stylish. The design by the Dots team is incredible. Like, this show has money behind it, and that's very impressive in this day and age for off Broadway. It's also very well cast. Everyone in it is on the same page. Everyone in it is a weirdo. Everyone in it is singing their face off. I want to give special shout out to old friend of the pod, Natalie Walker, who. I know I'm biased, but she does give my favorite performance in the show because she does what we talked about in the Once Upon a Mattress review, which is that she is giving a performance full of choices that are big, that are fast and. But they are specific. She is a character in this musical world, and she is the. The running joke is that she is the old maid sister of the team of sisters that Marla Mandel finds herself a part of. Marla Mandel, Stacy is a part of this team of sisters in this musical world. And Natalie's Flora is the oldest sister. She's also sexually active. There's a running joke where we always see her coming back on stage with a guy half dressed, and she's doing all this dominatrix stuff with them of putting fingers up their butt and eating their butt and things like that. And Natalie, I described it to her after the show. I was like, what? You're like. Because they wanted her to do sort of a Marilyn Monroe voice of the, like, sexy little bimbo. But what Natalie actually does is she does Megan Hilty as Marilyn Monroe. So it's a caricature of a caricature. And I don't think that's, like, what Natalie intended to do, but it is what she's doing. Like, I don't think she sat down and said, I'll do Megan Hilty, but. But I told her that, and she was like, oh, I guess I am. And she does the cadences of Megan Hilty of the. Have you ever seen a shape that is so perfectly round? That is absolutely what Natalie's vocal timbre is when she's speaking in this show. And everyone involved is making very smart, creative acting choices. My issue with the show, and it's hard to talk about it too much without spoiling things, is there just. There isn't. It needs a major rewrite. A lot of ideas in there can stick around, but they almost kind of need a very intense and boring dramaturg to come in and talk through all the story beats. Because there's a lot happening, and there are certain things as they were happening that I went, oh, it'd be really cool if that's the direction it went into. But then it sort of just gets dropped and moves on to another thing. There's a moment where you think, oh, what if this is going to be sort of Pleasantville? And in this world of musical theater, Marla Mendel, because she is essentially from the future and the outside world, introduces all these people from this golden age musical to the lives and styles of modern musicals and accidentally fast forwards this musical into the 60s and 70s and 80s. So they start learning, they start evolving into the Sondheim era and the mega musical and then our current modern musical trend. But it never really goes there. There's a moment where they start to, but it's literally just a moment. The musical is more interested in acknowledging tropes that you'll see sometimes in golden age shows, sometimes in more modern shows, and then kind of just dropping it from there. It does have a bit of the schming of ills, in my opinion, of not always acknowledging the genre as a whole, tropes as a whole, but more picking a specific musical without saying that musical's name and then claiming that that is a trope of the genre. The example I always give. And again, with Schmigadoon macago, I can only really go off of four or five episodes because friend of the Pod Brian Nash, sat me down to make me watch the whole thing. And I fell asleep after the third episode of Schmigadoon. And then I came back and he was like, okay, we're gonna do Chicago then. And I fell asleep after the third episode of Chicago. It just. I. It's not totally for me, but I understand. People love it, and I'm not gonna shit in their cereal. But one thing that they did in Chicago was, like, Cecily Strong saying things like, oh, yeah. In the 70s, musicals often had these omnipresent narrators that would do, like, soft shoes and all these things. And. And just, like, say something very specific, like an omnipresent narrator who would do a soft shoe and then try to get you to commit suicide by the end of the show. And it's like, no, babe, that's not a trope of 70s musicals. That's just Pippin. You know, it's saying that, oh, yeah, Golden Age musicals, they often had an opening number with no singing, no dialogue, just pantomime for seven and a half minutes that started the show. It's like, no, that's Carousel and that's west side Story. That's not Oklahoma. That's not Guys and Dolls. Actually, no, Guys and Dolls. That is the case. But Guys and Dolls does then go into, like, opening number. But it's not a trope. It's something that some musicals had done, but it was considered groundbreaking for the time. So Big Gay Jamboree often will lean on that. They also will lean into the kind of jokes that aren't really jokes. They're just references. They're just name drops. There's a lot of mileage they get out of Bravo and the Real Housewives, ultimately, because Marla Mandel, Stacy, even though she wanted to be an actress and that didn't really go well, she's decided, okay, I'm going to give all that up, and I want to be a Real Housewife on Bravo. And she has a whole song about it. And it's a running joke. And they make all these references to Bravo and the Housewives and the franchises. And if you are not a Bravo person, it will fly over your head. But the same is true of a lot of other references where you will laugh if you know what the reference is. And it doesn't necessarily make it funny. It just means you're in on the. You're in the club. You know what it is they're talking about. Some of them work and are genuinely funny, and some of them are more just like. I get that reference. And it's not necessarily something that is a flaw, because, as I said, it gets a reaction out of the crowd. It's not something that lasts And I think that everyone involved in Big Gay Jamboree is funnier and smarter than that. And I would really like them to push themselves to not do that as often, because it's ultimately pandering. You have an audience filled with gay men who are. Some of them are Fire island gays. Some of them are Bravo gays, vodka soda gays, what have you, golden age musical gays. And if you write enough references that are in their wheelhouse, they'll just have a grand old time. But that doesn't necessarily make it a gay show. It's just a gay show for that type of gay. And another thing, and this was something that someone had said to me afterwards was. Which I didn't even realize at the time, but for a show called Big Gay Jamboree, there's not a lot of queerness in. Kind of comes out later when Constantine's character arrives. But even then, it's more sort of name checking and reference making. But ultimately, while Marla Mandel is queer, she's lesbian. Her character Stacy, is a straight woman. And she is the person who informs everyone of gay culture of what being gay is and all of the gay terms and all the gay references. And it's a little odd that that's sort of how it goes in this show. I mean, obviously, Stacey has to be the lead. It's Marla's show. She wrote it. She's gonna be the star of it. But for a show called Big Gay Jamboree for the lead straight woman who then is like, here's what gay culture is. It's just not. It's not my fave. And that plus running into people outside the theater who are like, oh, we were about to go to clubcoming, but it was reserved for, like, a bachelorette party. And that bugged me that a queer club couldn't accept their queer patrons because it had been booked by a straight event. And the people I ran into, like, well, no, they're allies, and they're. They're giving them business. I'm like, no, no, they can be allies, but that is a queer space, and they are guests there. To be an allies, to understand that and to not overtake it with yourself, it's just. It's all very messy for me. And it all makes me question many, many, many, many things. So that already kind of tinted my viewpoint in regards to the main character of Stacey in Big Gay Jamboree. I can't say that I found the score to be terribly memorable in this show either. The ly well crafted. I Will say, very well structured and there's a lot of perfect rhymes, which is rare these days. And there are some solid tunes. I feel that they could have again gone a little further, pushed themselves a little further, because there's talent in this, there is intelligence and there's craft. I just wanted a little more, I'm not gonna lie. And there's a whole big third act reveal that just sort of undermines everything, in my opinion. Someone in the show afterwards are saying, like, no. If you notice in the design and all these things why some things are jarring and why this doesn't make sense, it's because of this big third act reveal. I'm like. But that actually now adds 40,000 more questions to the logistics of this whole show, which is not something you want to do. You want to set a standard of. Here are all the rules of the world. They're simple, but they are clear. And don't think about it ever again. Let's move on. It's similar to when Kate McKinnon informs Margot Robbie and Barbie is sort of how she has to get to the real world. She goes, this is what you do, and I don't make the rules. It's Mattel and it's odd, I know, but don't think about it, but this is how it works. Here we go. So you know how you get to the real world, it makes no sense. And they know that, but they're like, yeah, now you know. And don't ever think about it ever again. Don't think about it too much. And I think there could be a little bit more of that, because Big Gay Jamboree wants to be both a loving endorsement of musical theater, while acknowledging that it's silly, but also not actually delving much into it, into the history of it, and then into queer culture itself. Like, the queer culture that it embraces is. I don't mean to, like, name check them this way, in this negative way, because I ultimately think that they are a strong podcast and they've done a lot of great for the culture. But, like, Las Culturistas is a very specific kind of queer culture. And there's nothing wrong with it, but that's the queer culture that Big Gay Jamboree is sort of for. And if you're not a part of it, you can feel a little resentful if you're in the audience being like, a lot of this isn't for me, and I'm watching half the audience just lose their themselves. And for something called Big Gay Jamboree, to be gay and sitting there and feel like, well, this part isn't for me. I don't know. It's a weird dichotomy. It's an odd thing to think about again, I had a fun time, but with each passing day, I've thought about it less and less. I'll be honest. So see it for yourself. Decide how you feel. There is a fun amount of time to be had there. It is not a waste of time, but it is not ultimately what I hoped it would be. And that's it on Bigage and Brie. That's the tea on that. So we're gonna do one last show and then we're gonna take a quick break before we get into our final segment of the day. We saw Yellowface at Roundabout Theatre Company, written by David Henry Huang, directed by Lee Silverman. This is the Broadway premiere of Yellowface. It was at the Public theater in the mid 2000s, I think around 2006, 2007. It was a Pulitzer finalist, did not win, but it was a Pulitzer finalist. And it has had quite a few productions. One in London, one in la, I think even one in China. And I'm interested to see what ends up happening with the Tony eligibility for this show because while it is the Broadway premiere at this point, the show is about 18 years old and has had some major productions. And yeah, it could be a play, it could be a revival. I'll be very interested. The premise of Yellowface is it's semi autobiographical. David Henry Huang wrote M. Butterfly, that premiered in 1988 and won the Tony for best play that year. You can hear us talk about it more in the Miss Igon episode. Because when Miss Saigon came to Broadway in 1991, David Henry Hoang was one of the leaders of the backlash and the protests of Miss Igon coming to Broadway both for the subject matter, but more importantly of Jonathan Pryce coming in as the engineer, a character that is described as Eurasian, and Jonathan Pryce, who is fully Caucasian, coming in. And in London, there are already reports and photographs of him in yellowface, of doing slanty eyed makeup and bronzing his skin and blackening his hair. And we can say, oh, well, that was 36 years ago. We didn't know any better. We did. We did know better. It was already considered kind of gross for Mickey Rooney to be doing it in Breakfast at Tiffany's. And that was 26 years before Miss Aigon premiered. And so for us to make supposedly cultural and societal progress and then to have this happen, you can read a Lot of statements from Huang at that time that are much more articulate than what I could say. But point being, he led many of the protests. He was very much at the forefront of it. And then Ms. Sagan came in anyway and was a major commercial success. Jonathan Price won the Tony. And sort of as a response to it, Huang wrote a play called Face Value that was meant to be a big commentary, political satire of the whole situation of theater and race, of two Asian men putting on whiteface to come in and fuck up this incoming musical. And it was a very famous flop. It closed after a week of previews and lost $2 million, which was a record at the time for a stage play. It had Jane Grikowski in it, it had Mark Lynn Baker in it. It was directed by Jerry Zaks and. And Huang was able to bounce back pretty quickly after that. He had to play Golden Child. He wrote a new libretto for Flower Drum Song that had its critics. I can't say that that revival was extraordinarily popular, but he was Tony nominated for it. I believe that version is licensed. I have the script for it. I don't think it's a bad script. He co wrote the book for Aida, which I'm sure was a very nice paycheck for him. He wrote the book for Tarzan. We'll move on from that. And he's done a lot of work in Hollywood, but so Yellowface is the account of face value of the Missigon controversy followed by face value. And it goes through Huang being finding himself accidentally at the forefront of this protest and then writing Face Value in response to it and then face value flopping. What gets tricky. And the play is very funny. It's meant to be funny and was quite much funnier than I expected it to be, honestly. The thing about the casting and Face Value is they cast an actor as the Asian lead who they discover when they're out of town isn't Asian at all. He is fully white. But they believed during the auditions that he was mixed raced. And everyone keeps saying, oh, he doesn't look Asian. To which Huang takes offense of like, well, what's that supposed to mean? Like, you can be mixed race and not fully look Asian, but you still have Asian blood. And we're talking about authentic casting and politically correct casting. And we are righting a wrong here that Miss Saigon began. And everyone's sort of tiptoeing around the subject because you can't legally ask someone what their ethnicity is. When they ask this actor, he talks about his lineage from Siberia and being Jewish and all these other things. And, of course, the joke is the actor playing this part is Caucasian. Fully Caucasian. It's very obvious to us. But what was fascinating about the casting here is they have a fully diverse company of. They have an African American actress. They have an Asian actress. They have Kevin delaguila, who is Hispanic. They have a couple of white actors. They have Francis Zhu, who is Asian. And everyone is playing various ethnicities at any given time. I believe Mirinda Anderson at one point plays Janine Krakowski, and Miranda is African American. She also, I think, plays a man at one point, but I can't fully recall. Kevin Del Aguila plays Asian. He plays Hispanic. He plays Caucasian. Francis Zhu plays Asian. He plays Caucasian. He also plays David Henry, Hwang's father. And Daniel Dae Kim plays David Henry Huang. This is a very fictionalized account of what happened, and Hwang sort of lets the cat out of the back at the very end of the play that there's a lot that we've seen that didn't actually occur, and it's up to us to decide when the fiction took over in the play. For my money, I think the play happening, the play missigon happening, we all know, is real. That's well documented. Face value being written and burning on Broadway. That is also real. That is well documented. I think the casting is fictional, and everything that stems from that is fictional. I think that writing this play was most likely a cathartic artistic experience for Huang to make light of what happened, but also finding the dramatic irony of, well, what if we had cast somebody who we found out after the fact was actually Caucasian? And after all of this vocal protest against Miss Saigon, I ended up partaking in yellowface myself. The hypocrisy of all that. It's a great premise, and he has a lot of fun with it. The. The biggest compliments I will give this show, it is a great company. I think Daniel Dae Kim as David Henry Huang might be the weakest in it, which is not to say that he is bad. He is very good. He's very charming. He's very commanding. He's a little overly presentational for the first half. A little arc in his stylings, which is fine. It is a comedy, after all, and it's a very theatrical presentation. Lee Silverman does a lot of fluid staging and has these two pieces on turntables that are always turning with projection. So we're never in any place literal, and we're always seeing a very presentational show. But In a show like this, I feel like David Henry Hoang's character needs to be a bit more of the emotional and realistic center of all of this craziness. With all these other characters being so bold and brash, you have to tone down the archness of your performance, just so that way there's balance. And Daniel Dae Kim is sort of like, fuck that. I'm gonn fun too, which is totally valid and it's not bad. It's not a bad interpretation. But for what works best for me is sort of toning down that center so we have someone real to hold on to in all of this messiness. He really comes into his own in the second half, and I won't go into it too much, but he has a confrontation with a reporter played by Greg Keller, who is reporting on a major story dealing with David's father and. And which then devolves into talk of race and secret racism among people and double standards. And that scene is, first of all very well written, but that is probably Daniel's best scene in the whole show. The reason why I say he's probably the weakest in the company is because everyone else in this company is really fantastic, in the same way that I talked about in Big Gay Jamboree, that everyone is, you know, a character actor making big, fast, specific choices. So is everyone in yellowface. Miranda Anderson, Kevin Del Aguila, Ryan Eggold, Greg Keller, Shannon. Sorry, Shannon. I'm gonna butcher your name. I think it's Tio. Shannon. Shannon, Teo T Y O. They are all wonderful. They all get to play real people. They all get to play weird people. They get to play against race, against gender, against age. They really just run the gamut, and it's a phenomenally fun time to watch them do it. I'm a big fan of Kevin. As I mentioned last year, his work in Some Like It Hot was my favorite in that production and was probably my second choice for featured actor in a musical that year after Justin Cooley. But that was a good category no matter what. And I also want to make a special mention to Francis Zhu, who my previous experience with Francis was in Thoroughly Modern Millie. He played Bun Fu, and he is a phenomenal talent in this. He's done the show before. He did it when he was at the Public, and what he does is very similar to what everyone else does. But there's something about both the character and how he approaches the. The whole show where it has that archness that I was talking about. Daniel Dae Kim. It's performative, it's fun. He has great comedic timing, but it's all rooted in this realistic optimism. His character, David Henry Huang's father, is a Chinese immigrant who came to America, loves America, believes in the American dream, and found a lot of success and has no qualms about any kind of Asian representation. You know, when Miss Saigon is happening, he calls up his son. He's like, I'm telling all my friends, because you're a hotshot, Tony winning playwright. You can get all my friends tickets to Miss Saigon. We all want to see it. It looks so beautiful. And David's like, dad, I'm protesting it. I'm famously protesting it. He's like, yeah, I know. But like, whatever. It seems like it's gonna be a great time. And there's something really sweet about that of someone who, when it comes to art, just wants to enjoy it and wants to see himself on stage no matter what, and can find the good in even something like that. And he's just a welcome presence every time. His character is a welcome presence, but Francis in particular is a welcome presence, and I will be lobbying hard for him to be remembered for Tony nominations in April, May 1, because I think he deserves it. He's been around for a while. This is a wonderful opportunity for him. Oh, I also saw him in Once Upon a Mattress at Encores. I forgot about that. He played the wizard in that, and he very good. But that role is a big fat nothing. And if you don't believe me, watch Brooks Ashmanskas, who is one of the comedic geniuses of our time, do his absolute best with that thing and still not be able to really steal the show. And Brooks can steal the show anywhere with as little stage time as you can give him. And the wizard just doesn't do that. So Francis was very good as the wizard at Encores, but this is a really great showcase for him, and I'm very happy for him. The play itself, as I said, it's surprisingly funny. And it's about a hundred minutes, and it's about 100 minutes, maybe like an hour 50. It could use a little bit of tightening. It did lose me a little bit in the second half as things took a turn for the political and business side. I've mentioned this before. Like, when people talk about business stuff in shows, my brain tunes out. Not because it doesn't interest me, but just like, I have a hard time understanding it. I'm very much a dumb dumb that way. But it's all rooted to David Henry Wong's character and what he's going through, in addition to him constantly worrying about people finding out about him casting a white actor in an Asian role and the fallout that comes from that, because ultimately they do fire that actor, but he does not. And the actor's name is Marcus, played by Ryan Eggol, who is making his Broadway debut in this. And he's also very good. The character more sort of exists to be an accidental foil to David Henry Hoang, but it doesn't work if the actor plays it too villainous or plays it too dumb. You just kind of have to play it as a well intentioned, not idiot, but just a well intentioned fool, I guess. Someone who's unaware of the issues that they are causing. It's the similar connection to Francis Jiu's character of always seeing the good in the things people are finding the bad in. But in this case, Marcus is part of the bad and, and is actively contributing to said bad. And so him not understanding that makes him a problem. So it's a. It's a very good performance by Ryan. Everyone involved is very good. The show, as I said, it's. It's relatively tight. I think it could be a little tighter in the second half. The first 45 minutes to an hour is definitely the best of the show. It's the funniest of the show. It has a really sharp eye towards the theatrical industry, the hypocrisy of a lot of people, and just sort of how impossible it is to get to the truth of anything because everyone is hiding something. Everyone's just trying to work, everyone's trying to get a show up, and nobody wants to get cancelled, and nobody wants their show to get cancelled. So it's like you eat a lot of shit, you walk on a lot of eggshells, and sometimes that blows up in your face because you really need to say the hard truth in order to get to the root of the problem. But people won't do it. And that is sort of where Hwang is finding the comedic meat of this show. So I recommend it. It's definitely one of my favorite things I've seen this season at this point. I guess another con I would say, is that the Haims, while a small theater, is probably too small for this show. They do try to play up the technical elements of it, to not make it seem so small without making it seem overblown. And I think the design is very well crafted. It's not necessarily a gorgeous set, but it's very functional for what they're trying to do. And it's more like this should be at the booth. This should be at the haze. So the American Airlines is just like a hundred seats too many for this. And it's also, like, even with a small auditorium or a small seating capacity, the Haymes is a still, like, very ornate theater. It's a large stage. It's got a high ceiling. It's a theater where, you know, they're about to do Pirates of Penzance. So it's. There's nothing you can really do about it. It's a Roundabout show. This is Roundabout's only Broadway theater that they're using right now because Studio 54 is about to be used by Wonderful World. And Juliet is still at the Sondheim, though who knows for how long? So what can you do for the theater that they've been given? I think Silverman and her production team have filled it as well as they can, and they should be very happy with the results. It is. It is a very good time. This is either tied or just under Omar in terms of my rankings of shows this Broadway season. Both have a lot of similar pros and cons. I think Omari, just by being a. By being a tighter show, is maybe nudging Yellowface a little bit more. But Yellowface by tackling big issues in a very light way is a very neat trick, and that's not something that we should ignore. So props to Huang, props to Silverman, props to the entire cast. And again, major congrats to Francis Zhu and his really special performance in this. So that's it on the reviews right now. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we are going to do a little reflection on some news this week. Take it away, Billy. I beg to differ with you. How do you mean? You're the top. Yeah. You're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire. All right, so we are back. As many of you know, we have lost quite a few people in the entertainment industry in the last week. We lost Maggie Smith. We lost Kris Kristofferson. It was just announced that we lost John Amos. And as of yesterday, it was announced that we lost both Gavin Creel and Ken Page. And the theater community in particular has been genuinely heartbroken for both. I will say there's been a bit more of an outcry about Gavin's passing than with Ken's, and I think that is the unfortunate thing of timing. Gavin's passing was announced earlier that day and then Ken's was later that night. And everyone was already so caught up with Gavin that it feels like there wasn't enough room for Ken. And Ken was older than Gavin, 22 years older. Gavin passed tragically at 48, Ken at 70. But I don't want to start a narrative that Ken had, you know, come to his time. 70 is not old, and certainly not old enough to say that your life is done. Maggie Smith at 89 with the life and career that she's had. While it is tragic to lose someone so monumental and epic, there was sort of a feeling in the last couple of years of, it'll happen, it's gonna happen. We have to be prepared. In the same way when Sondheim passed, you know, devastating because of who he is and what he did and what he meant to all of us. But at over 90 years old, we were sort of getting ready for it. So I want to first just say, you know, Maggie Smith was a phenomenal actress, which is not a hot take, and deserved all of the flowers she got in the time she got in the public consciousness from her passing. Chris Kristofferson, also huge imprint. I also want to just say Ken Page and also Adrian Bailey. Adrian Bailey's passing. Adrian Bailey was never a Broadway star, but Adrian Bailey was able to hold on to a 30 plus year career on Broadway and a longer career in theater in general and a major member of the Broadway community, even after his last Broadway show, which was, I think, Little Mermaid. And to have a career in theater that lasts that long, especially when you're not a leading man, especially when you're a person of color, it's just incredible. I mean, the man was in Kiss of the Spider Woman and Jelly's Last Jam, the Wild Party, the Little Mermaid, Smokey Joe's Cafe. He was one of the original cast members of Smokey Joe's Cafe. And I want to make it clear that you don't have to be a Tony winner for your career, for your life to have mattered. You don't have to have been, you know, under 50 when you pass for your passing to be tragic. So I would like to just give a moment to acknowledge the losses of Adrian Bailey and Ken Page and how sad it is and how much what they've done means to all of us. You know, Ken with the original old Deuteronomy and Cats and is in the film version of Cats of the Lane. Page, who is famously one of the original cast members of Ain't Misbehaven which was a monumental piece to Broadway and came out to the scene young, I think like 19 or 20. When he was. I think he started as a replacement line in the Wiz at 20 years old and went on to play Nicely Johnson in the first all black production of Guys and Dolls on Broadway, where he really got a Star is born moment with that show, and which launched him into a misbehaven, which launched him into Cats. He was the original father in Children of Eden at the world premiere in London. You can hear him sing on that. I mean, just a gorgeous, gorgeous voice. Very identifiable. You can also hear his work in Nightmare Before Christmas. Hasn't been on Broadway since 1999, but still always worked and toured. And I think because it had been so long, not many people under, you know, felt the impact of losing him in the way they had with Gavin, who has been a little more active in New York in the last few years. But I still want to give them their acknowledgments. But that does, you know, leave us back to Gavin. Losing anybody is hard. And it's weird to be a fan of someone who meant so much to you, who impacted you so much that you never knew that you might have not even ever met, maybe never even saw them on stage. And I know that I sometimes ask myself, like, if I'm allowed to feel how I feel when someone passes who I didn't really know, because I didn't know Gavin. I met him once and it was lovely. It's, you know, all the things you hear about Gavin Creel. He was charming, he was sweet, he was professional, he listened. It was a professional setting in which we met, and he would never remember it, but I remembered it. I had seen him on stage quite a few times. I saw him in Thoroughly Modern Millie. I saw him in hello Dolly. I saw him in into the Woods. I saw his work Walk on through, which I will get to. That's really what I want to focus on in a little bit. And by having a foot in this community, I have gotten to know many people and become close to many people who were very close to him. I have two friends in particular who were very, very close friends of Gavin Creel's. And I reached out to them when I heard of his passing, because if I was feeling how I was feeling, I could only imagine what they felt. And I know that everyone who knew him is feeling it tremendously, and the people who are especially close with him are feeling it. I think the tragedy of Gavin's passing comes From a few things one, yes, he was young. 48 is far too young to pass. It happened very suddenly. He was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer in July and passed less than three months later. And many people didn't know. I didn't know. And again, as I said, I knew people who were very close with him. It was knowledge among friends, but it wasn't widespread. I think it was determined that he didn't want it to be known by too many people, only those close to him to sort of be prepared for when he would die. And that's a testament to how beloved he was that everyone kept to those wishes. Because that's news you want to tell as many people. You want everyone to be there and do what they can. But if it's his wish, it's his wish. It's also the fact that Gavin Creel was synonymous with life. He was known for being just a never ending source of energy and optimism and passion for living. There's that post of Benj Pasek going around where the last thing he got from him, a text from him, I suppose it was after he got his egot, was just saying how proud he was of Benj for truly living, of taking life by the hands and making the most of it. And that's sort of how I understand. Gavin always lived. He was a very funny, very sweet, very kind person who always was jumping at the chance to have a new opportunity to try new things, to give what he had and what he had learned and teach to as many people as he could and give compliments and brighten people's days and it's a really lovely thing to know. When people pass, we tend to glorify them afterwards, which is a double edged sword because when you're living and you hear about someone's passing and you hear about all the amazing things that they were to everyone, it can definitely make you feel small of well, I'm not living that kind of way and what am I doing wrong? And the truth is, you know, Gavin Creel was a human being and he was a person of this world. You don't make the choice to live and have experiences and, and feel as much as you can and know as many people as you can and know as much as you can and create what you can without having bad experiences and having bad relationships with people. That's just part of the human experience. I'm sure that he broke hearts. I know his heart was broken a few times. Again, we'll talk about this and walk on through. I'm sure that he had fights. And I'm sure he could engage in gossip and all the things that we all do, but it's more that once somebody passes, all that stuff doesn't matter as much anymore, and you're left with the good that they left you with, of the moments that made you happy, that made you feel seen, made you feel heard. And it's very inspiring to see how many people had that experience with him. And it's painful. It's painful to know that we have come to a chapter with him far too early where he is no longer an active participant in our joy. He is no longer doing things to make us feel joy. The joy we have from Gavin comes from our memory of him, of the art that he left behind. And I think it's also inspiring to know that. To know also just of that art that he left behind, of all the things that he did in the short time that he had and all the things that he was about to do. For me, what was very troubling and upsetting was knowing that he was on a new chapter. As an artist, everyone talks about his voice, which is, of course, one of the most beautiful male voices ever to grace Broadway. And I was very fortunate to see him live and to, you know, just have the time that I had just pouring over recordings of him. And it was definitely a voice that we all aspired to have an ease and a purity to it and a healthiness to it, as well as being just impressive. And as an actor, to watch him go from debonair leading men to then becoming much more of an. Of a messy artist, of an actor, you know, of going. He had sort of like a renaissance when he opened on Broadway in hair in 2009, which I'm sure was also much more true to who he was as a person than Jimmy in Thoroughly Modern Millie or Jean Michel in La Cage. And it's. And I'll mention La Cage in a second, because this all ties back to who he was as a person. But then he starts to do Book of Mormon, and he does hello, Dolly and he does into the woods, and we see a sillier side of him, and we see him do comedic roles and just try to do it, you know, put on as many hats as an actor as you can, because you're not. You're going to get typecast. You're not always going to be allowed to try new things. But when you have the leverage of a Tony award, the leverage of name recognition, of being in so many shows, you can start to try and branch out and allow people to think of you differently as you try to expand your craft. Because being an actor can also be very limiting. Your voice only goes to a certain note. Your look you don't have much control over. You can try to get surgery, you can try to work out or gain weight, but ultimately your type is your type and people will view you as a certain kind of way. So if you have any autonomy to change that, that's impressive. And to do it is very impressive. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that everything that he did as an actor was my jam. And I don't think he would tell you that either. He had an interview of when he sort of looks back on his reviews and the shows he had done. Millie was a beautiful experience, but also a very heavy experience. They were not a well received show critically. They won the Tony and they ran, but it was never really considered at the time, like, oh, you are in the hit of the year. That was Mamma Mia. You're in the critical darling of the year, that was Urinetown. They were sort of the right show at the right time. And it launched many careers, his Suttons. But even Sutton Foster will talk about this. You can read about it in Hooked, her memoir. You can read about it in Nothing Like a Dame. It was a difficult process. For all the joy that it brought, there was difficulty to it. And from Millie, Gavin then does La Cage, a big revival of a Tony winning musical with big names attached. And he's playing what is arguably the worst role in it, the Shitty Son, probably one of the most hated roles in musical theater, honestly, and with just one real song, which is a nice song, but it's not one of the barn burners. And he talked about in an interview once about the New York Times review for the show, which was mixed for that production and kind of negative on Gavin saying with his ponytail and his affectations, you have the feeling that he's gonna run away with a Kajell instead of Anne, his fiance. And I can't remember exactly what Gavin's feelings about that were, but it was clear in the interview that he never really felt comfortable playing that role, that he didn't think he was particularly right for it. The role is also very limiting. And I don't think it's a coincidence that when Gavin Creel, as a person came out publicly as a gay man in 2009, or I guess 2007, but 2009, when he did Hair is when we as all of a fan base finally recognized his career as an actor really blossomed in a really exciting way because by being honest with himself in his life, that allowed him to be more of a risk taker with his career of not having to just be boxed into, well, I gotta be the handsome leading man now, because he was a dreamy gentleman. But he also could allow himself to be effeminate on stage, to be wacky on stage, to play roles that are not just the. I need people to think of me as straight so I can keep working. And we had this whole career renaissance with him with that, from hair to woods and everything in between. But ultimately I want to talk a bit more about his work as a writer because he started a new chapter as a musical theater writer. He'd always been writing songs. You know, he had a band and a solo pop career, which I listened to. I try to listen to the pop careers of all of the Broadway actors out there just to be supportive, but I don't always find it fits with a lot of Broadway actors, even if you hear talent in their writing. But I had seen Gavin's show walk on through at the Met when it was a concert, because he got commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to write this sort of song cycle about their collection. They said, you know, come on in and just get inspired, see what you like and write this piece for us. And he did, and the concert happened. And between the concert and the MCC Theater, he did a workshop of it. I think he did another presentation of it at Williamstown, but then it had a full blown production at mcc and it changed quite a bit. It went from being a song cycle to being a genuine musical with him at the focal point. And I mean, there was already kind of a lineage in the concert version at the Met with narration and whatnot, but there wasn't much of a emotional arc to it, not in the way that it got to be at mcc. And I was really impressed with it at the Met. I thought. I did not know that he had it in him to write songs like that, songs that were clever, songs that were heartfelt. He had a really wonderful ear for composition. Really melodic, really catchy, a very what's what I'm looking for. He really held himself to write well crafted lyrics, sharp, distinct lyrics. And that's not something that a lot of people care much about. You'll see a lot of scores where the lyrics get clunky, they don't scan or they are clever, but they. But they don't fit the mood or the. Or the. Or the vibe of the. Of the story. And maybe it's because in Walk on through, he's dealing with all different types of art. So there's always a kind of shift, but it always. And it's. And it's coming from his viewpoint, but it is. It was very. It was very fascinating and very exciting to watch how he approached other people's art through song and. And even though there were different genres going on in there, indie folk and pop and whatnot, it was a very theatrical type of storytelling. And then to see it at the MCC Theater was even more inspiring. In a lot of ways, the show improved. There are two things that. That changed from the Met to MCC that I was a little more disappointed in. And I guess I'll say that. I'll just say it now. One is that he does. I don't recall him ever saying in Walk on through it mcc, that the whole show started off as a. As an assignment, as a commission from the Met. It just sort of is. He shows up at the Met and has all of these feelings. And I know that in the New York Times review for that show, which was very negative, unfairly, I thought one of the things they said was, well, the whole thing just feels like an advertisement for the Met. And I think that would have changed if he said, well, like, they assigned me this and I was regretting it, I didn't want to do it, but here we are. And I actually learned something from all of it. The other thing that changed, and it's not a negative, but it's interesting to think about it on both ends of the spectrum, because I feel like it talks to. About the human experience and how Gavin Creel was to so many people and how he never could be to some people. The character of Gavin in the show is going through the medden. And as he's absorbing the art, he's reflecting on his own life, on his religious upbringing, on his relationship that has most recently ended and ended in a traumatic fashion and a lot of great heartbreak. And he's questioning a lot of things about his own life and his career. Oh, maybe I should go into teaching. I don't really know if I feel like being an artist anymore. I don't know if I ever want to be in love anymore. I don't know. Was my upbringing beautiful? Was it traumatic? Did it leave me with any scars? Are there things I need to be working on? What am I learning right now? What's the point of doing any of this? And towards the end of the show, he meets another guy who's looking At a painting, I think it's by Dennis Hopper. And they're talking about this lone woman in the window of an apartment building in a slew of apartment buildings by the highway. And it's in New York City. And they're talking about what each of them see in the painting by looking closer, by looking at the details and by seeing each detail, how it informs, how they absorb the work, right? And ultimately, how they absorb it, how they view it, not only comes from them taking in all the details, but where they are in their lives, who they are in this world, what led them to that moment, which is true of any art. I say this all the time. How you feel about a show often comes down to where you were in your life when you saw it, right? My best example is my mother's mother, Nanny Nancy Tickton saw a company on Broadway in 1970 and hated it. And then in 1993, they had a reunion concert of the entire original company, Dean Jones included, at the Vivienne Beaumont Theatre on the set of My Favorite Year. And my grandmother was working at Lincoln center at the time, and so she went to the reunion concert, and she loved it. Now 23 years had passed, and in those 23 years, she got divorced from my grandfather. She became a single woman in New York City. She became a working woman, a very successful career, her own apartment, and she was, in a lot of ways, free. She didn't choose to divorce my grandfather. That was his choice. But by choosing to do it, he freed her. And she didn't realize how much happier she had become. So by seeing Company 1970, she was seeing her own life and a lot of her own unhappiness that she was unwilling to acknowledge. And then by 1993, she had evolved so much and become so much more independent that seeing all of that, it was finally funny to her and enjoyable for her. And that's sort of what this scene in Walk on through was talking about with this Hopper painting. The thing that changed was that at the Met, and this was a scene between Gavin Creel and Ryan Vasquez at the Met after they have this moment together, this really lovely, touching moment of two strangers connecting over a piece of art. Part of you is going, oh, does this mean that Gavin Creel is going to date Ryan Vasquez? Now? Is this, like, their meet cute for their love story? And at the Met, that's when Ryan Vasquez said, oh, I gotta go. My girlfriend's waiting for me. It was really nice talking to you. And, you know, Gavin makes a face. And we all laugh because he definitely felt like, oh, maybe this is an intimate moment and it's a little bit of egg on your face. But the stakes are so low that you can't be totally embarrassed. You'll forget it pretty soon after that. But it doesn't undermine the beauty of that moment he had with Ryan. Sometimes people come into your life for no reason. They're there to have a special moment. Sometimes they come in to fuck shit up for you. Not everyone is a soulmate. Not everyone is a best friend. Not everyone is the love of your life. Sometimes it's just somebody you had a cool moment with. And that was really nice to me at mcc. That isn't how it ends. It ended with Ryan saying, oh, my name is Gavin, and Gavin saying, my name is Gavin. And Ryan kind of looking at him intently. And those of you who've seen Ryan on stage, whether in the Notebook or anywhere, know that Ryan is very good at these stock still looking at you, I am gazing into your soul look. And he was like, huh, how about that? You know, we're both named Gavin on I wonder what that's about. And it was very sort of spiritual, otherworldly. And I preferred the first version. The second version, I think, is maybe a little more in line with how I understand Gavin's viewpoint was of the world based on friends who were very close with him, that there's so much connection through all of us. People can come into your lives for a moment and make a huge impact. And there are so many forces at work that we'll never understand. And even if everything is just a coincidence, the cosmic alignment of everything can make even a coincidence something really impactful. And so it almost felt as if in that moment that everything was aligned for this very powerful encounter. And there's a lot of beauty to that as well. I preferred the first one only because the pessimist that I am. And to be fair, this was also. I saw it at the Met before I ever met Bub, who inspired yours truly and the feelings we had of our time together. I liked the idea of maybe not ending up with somebody and still having meaningful moments with strangers. That was a little more impactful to me at the time and probably would have left me in tears if I had seen it two years later. But I think what I appreciated about Walk on through so much, in addition to the craft of the songs, was how much of himself Gavin Creel put on stage. And in the show. It was a very personal work. He was very open about his relationship and his family and acknowledging all the things about himself that while many people around him really love and he likes about himself, are not always the best. When you are romantically involved with someone. How? By looking for the best, by trying to always do good, by trying to be involved. It puts a lot of pressure on himself and the person who he's with. Oh, you're the person with Gavin Creel. You must be just as active and just as spiritual and just as lovely and just as optimistic. Gavin's also a very passionate person, and that can come up with its own set of anxiety. I have a friend who actually worked with Gavin on Walk on through during the time in the Met, and because it was premiering for people who had never seen it before, it. It was getting to him. He was very anxious during that whole pre production time and that rehearsal time and just didn't know how it was going to be received. And he wanted it to go as well as it could. And that's a lot of pressure to put on yourself, on the people around you. And, yeah, tension happens. And when it's over, you can sort of relax and be the best version of yourself that you aim to be. And I'm sure that the critical reception at MCC was not what he wanted, but I know that he was working on shows immediately afterwards undeterred. And I felt that some of the reviews were unfair because it wasn't acknowledging what was actually happening. It was how they chose to interpret it, similar to that final scene of the show with the Hopper painting. They weren't looking at what was there. They were going with how they felt. And then judging the whole piece based off of that idea of this is just an advertisement for the Met. No, it's an advertisement for art and how you view it and how art can make you rethink moments of your life, which is what was happening in the show. He was having all these flashbacks to his. To his partner, his former partner and the fights they had and the love that they had and the pain he was in, as well as his own contributions to the breakup and all of the quirks about himself that were both charming and also detrimental to founding a new relationship with someone. Trust issues and the impish Peter Pan energy that he was very known for, that can, I'm sure, put a strain on more intimate partnerships. And that is such a brave thing to do for anybody. You know, it's hard to know where we toe the line between honesty and overindulgence. Right. Of when you are sharing with an audience a side of Yourself that you don't often share with many people. When does that become bravery and when does that become egotism? I suppose I remember I went to a cabaret with a friend that was filming this for, you know, their company. And the person who was doing the cabaret ended up just sort of making the whole thing a therapy session and talking about all of their trauma and their just very. Some horrific experiences in their lives that they then set to song and then talking about how their parents were in the audience, and the parents didn't know about any of this happening, but, like. Like it needed to happen. And we all sort of sat there going, like, oh, are we in the middle of something that we shouldn't be in the middle of? It didn't have that honest component to it, that genuine component to it that something like Walk on through did. And Walk on through wasn't perfect, but there was so much creativity in it. And it was so interesting to see how Gavin Creel had shaped it over that time and didn't just rest on having a good reception at the Met and really wanted to make it something bigger and deeper and something bigger than it had been. And it was exciting to see where he was going to go from there, because as a writer, he had a lot of talent, he had a lot of empathy, but he had a lot of perspective. And I ultimately think that was. That's what anyone needs when you're writing, especially for musicals, where honesty is key. And I said the word genuine, which I think is stuck in my brain, because Friend of the pod, Robbie Roselle, had said something similar about Gavin Creel online, about. You know, one of the things you're gonna hear about him is just how genuine he was. Whether he was overly spiritual or overly optimistic, depending on the kind of person you were or are, he was genuine, which is rare in this industry, for an industry that is based off of a form of entertainment that requires you to appear genuine, to sell the stories you're selling. He was someone who actually was. When he said he liked you, you could believe him. When he said you were talented, you could believe him. And that's sort of all channeled into the purity of his singing, of his work. And I know that for me, watching everyone's response to his passing has been interesting. I just spent a lot of time talking about the work he put into the world. I didn't know him as a human being, so I can't really talk too much about his relationships, his friendships. I read the stories. I see all these other things. I'm also I come from a family of pessimists. You've all listened to me talk to my dad on this podcast who's one of his favorite musicals is Follies. That isn't one of your favorite musicals. If you have a beautiful outlook on life and it's very easy to feel very small and to feel like you don't matter and that nobody cares when that is, that's your go to mind frame of well, the world is cruel and the world is large and who are we but specks of dust? To quote Billy Bigelow, we don't count at all two little people, you and die. And so it's hard sometimes to look at people with what is very genuine responses of love and passion and people are feeling how they feel. But every now and then, for every person I look at who writes a very beautiful story about him, who knew him or worked with him or anything, people who, like myself, who didn't really know him, who might have sort of been near his orbit without actually ever meeting him, or only meeting him once in a professional setting for an hour and granted getting to talk to him. But as I said, he would never have remembered that moment. It was memorable for me. And sometimes I will read stories of what he inspired people to do and that is beautiful. But then also every now and then I'll read a post that just gives me a little bit of a twitch, somebody sharing something that they did because it's so quote unquote, was inspired by Gavin or a piece that they got to make with him of theirs, a recording or whatever. And similar to I can't tell you what's the tipping point between honesty and overindulgence in a piece. I can't tell you when something is a genuine, a genuine processing of sadness and almost like non narcissism because that's an actual syndrome, but I guess egotism of self centeredness, of when you make someone's passing about you. I can't tell you what the tipping point is. I can only tell you that I know it when I see it. And I don't want to tell people how to feel, but just know you're going to see a lot of that. We've already seen it now, we've seen it in the past, you're going to see it again in the future. How people respond to loss tells you a lot about who they are as a person. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're a bad person, but it is very informative. The last thing I want to say because with a passing as tragic as this one is, and we've had so many tragic passings in the past, we're going to have more of them in the future. You know, cancer is an absolute asshole. And with this, we also just see how unfair life can be. For so much good fortune that Gavin had. He had this terrible stroke of luck, which all. It's really all it is, cancer, especially at the time of the diagnosis and how quickly it is. This kind of cancer, this rare form that it is. It's just absolute misfortune. When we have a pain like this. And this is whether you lose a family member or you lose a loved one or something terrible happens with yourself, you do eventually have to continue on with living. And. And it can feel disingenuous, it can feel hurtful, it can feel selfish to want to have a good experience when something so sad has happened. I say this because I'm recording this on a Tuesday. Yesterday was the day that it was announced that Gavin had died. And I had to go to this gala. Had to go. I was invited to go to a gala for a theater company, and I'm not fancy. I was invited by a much fancier friend who had a spare seat at his table because they were all couples and I was the reliable single person. And I did expect the vibe in the room to kind of be morbid because online it felt very heavy, but the room was very alive. And it felt odd all night long for everyone to just be very up. And I'm not putting any kind of spotlight at anybody. And I think because of how soon after the news is why it mostly felt odd. But in general, I just want to say this. I want to do this quote from the TV show the Facts of Life. And some of you just heard that title and probably laughed out into the universe. The Facts of Life is a fun show from the 80s, late 70s through the mid-80s. And for those of you who don't know, it's about a bunch of teenage girls at a school and their house mother, Mrs. Garrett. In season five, one of the characters, Natalie's father, dies very suddenly of a heart attack, and she has to deal with the Shiva with her mother, and all the girls come and whatnot, and the unfairness of this happening. And then the next episode is everyone's starting to kind of move forward, and Natalie hasn't really grabbed that zest for life that she had, that zaniness and that sarcastic wit that she had. She's kind of removing herself from the narrative and just being quiet. And keeping away from everybody. And Mrs. Garrett meets her in the kitchen one night as all the other girls are sort of having a fun party. And Natalie just sort of stays in the kitchen eating alone. And she's not being morbid. She's just saying, you know, I don't. I don't really want to go out there. I don't want to do it. I would much rather just be here right now and be quiet. And Mrs. Garrett tells her know, a few weeks after my father died, some friends took me to the movies to see some, like at hotel. I laughed for two hours and then I went home and cried for two days. I missed my dad so much. How could I have had such a good time? But then I realized I wasn't forgetting my dad when I was having a good time. I was letting go of some of the pain of losing him. It's okay. That's how we get on with our lives. With each loss we have, with each painful experience that we have, we hold on to the good. If we're remembering all the good of Gavin and Adrian and Ken and Dame Maggie Smith, I'm calling everybody by their first names. Like I'm best friends with them. I'm not. But we're being familiar today. We were holding on to the good memories that we have and the good things they put out in the world. Eventually, we let the pain of not having them around anymore no longer consume us. The fact that we had that pain proves that we're alive. It proves that they meant something to us. And as we hold onto their memory, we hold on to the good and we continue living our lives because that's ultimately what they would have wanted. They would be happy to know that we were sad in the time of hearing of it. It proves that they meant something to us, and that is very, you know, welcoming. But we then do continue. Moving on is not forgetting. It's not letting go of the memory. It's letting go of the pain. And that is how we continue onwards into this world. So sorry to end on a somber note, but that is sort of where we're at on this beautiful day as we release this as a perk. And I hope any of you who listened to the south park bigger, longer and uncut episode before this got some happiness out of listening to that. I haven't edited it yet. I'm assuming that Marcus and I just go on and talk gibberish for two and a half hours about how much we love the movie. And if you haven't watched, you probably don't know what we're talking about, but we recorded that on Sunday, the day before the news broke of Gavin and Ken. And I'm in a different mind frame now than I was when I recorded that. And I have a whole bunch of episodes I have to record this upcoming weekend. Jekyll and Hyde, American Psycho, the West side Story remake. So before I get to any of that, I just sort of wanted to have a moment of reflection. And this will be coming out in a few days, but just had it on top of mind, and that's it. I would like to actually close out with a song from Gavin, whether it's a song from Walk on through, if I can find one, that would be really beautiful. Otherwise. The other option would be a song he sang by Sam Davis called Greenwich Time. Some of you might know it as sung by Rebecca Luker. Gavin recorded it as well. And in fact, Gavin Creel's rendition of it was my introduction to that song. Because in college, we had a semester where we were only doing new works from people who hadn't had their stuff produced on stage yet, or if they had, it was in small theaters or concept albums. And I was actually given Greenwich Time by Sam Davis. And I remember thinking that the song was so beautiful, and I was petrified because Sam was coming in to watch us perform his stuff, and I was like, sam's had Gavin Creel sing this. I am coming in singing this. Like the fuck do I think I am? And Sam was very lovely. But it's a song that I have refused to sing in public because when you have Gavin Creel and Rebecca Luker on record, you're like, I'm not. I'm not giving anyone the chance to hear me do that and compare. No way, no how. So either we're gonna close out with Walk on through, something from Walk on through or Greenwich Time. And if it's not Greenwich Time, I highly recommend you go out and you listen to it, because, again, beautiful song, and Gavin's interpretation of it is just vocal caramel, as it always was. And that's it. We'll see you guys next week for the next episode of Grab Bag. It'll be another fun episode about a very dark subject matter, A lot of murder in this Grab Bag series. I have found a lot of men committing murder in these shows. I don't know how that happened. That's just the fickle finger of fate, as Charity Hope Valentine once said. And that's it. I hope you guys have a good rest of your week. And as I said. Also, you know, if you can, please donate to the Yours Truly fundraising page. It's been very heartwarming to see everyone donate so far, and I hope to believe that people are choosing to donate later at some point. Your support means the world to me, so thank you. Have a good rest of your week, guys. Bye. Jazz gets guitarist on a park bench Drowsy browsing at the Strand Not a soup as long as you are near me I am the richest fella With Sunday so seductive Monday morning.