The Boys in the Band – Database

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The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley.[1] The play premiered Off-Broadway in 1968, and was revived on Broadway for its 50th anniversary in 2018. The play revolves around a group of gay men who gather for a birthday party in New York City and was groundbreaking for its portrayal of gay life. The play has been called “A true theatrical game-changer, The Boys in the Band helped spark a revolution by putting gay men’s lives onstage — unapologetically and without judgment — in a world that was not yet willing to fully accept them.”[2]

Plot

The play is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the backgrounds of characters are revealed in the course of a birthday party.
Harold celebrates his birthday. He becomes increasingly morose about losing his youthful looks and claims that he no longer can attract cute young men.
“Cowboy”, an attractive blond prostitute who is “not too bright”,[3] is one of Harold’s birthday presents.
Alan McCarthy is an unexpected party guest. Michael’s married college friend,[4] he is visiting New York and anxious to tell Michael something but hesitant to do so in front of the others. It is suggested that he once had homosexual affairs while in college, but his sexual orientation is never explicitly stated, leaving it to audience interpretation.
The party is given by Harold’s six closest friends:
Michael is Harold’s “friend-enemy”,[4] the host, and a lapsed Catholic as well as an alcoholic. He is the catalyst for most of the drama of the play.
Donald is Michael’s conflicted boyfriend who has moved from the city to the Hamptons to spurn the homosexual “lifestyle”, and is undergoing psychoanalysis.
Bernard is an African-American, who still pines for the wealthy white boy in whose house his mother worked as a maid.
Emory is a flamboyant and effeminate interior decorator. He is often campy in his sense of humor, which serves to irritate others.
Larry, a fashion photographer who prefers multiple sex partners.
Hank, Larry’s live-in boyfriend who has been married to a woman from whom he is separated and is divorcing. He “passes” as straight and disagrees with Larry on the issue of monogamy.
During the party, the humor takes a nasty turn, as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a “game”, where each man must call someone who he has loved and tell them about it. Michael, believing that Alan has finally “outed” himself when he makes his call, grabs the phone from him and discovers Alan has called his wife. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael in the end.

Original Cast Members – Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan McCarthy, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard

Time Line

Date Premiered – April 14, 1968
Theatre – Theatre Four – New York City
Original language – English
Genre – Drama – Setting – Manhattan

Movie Released 1970

Title and Creation

The Boys in the Band was written entirely by American playwright Mart Crowley. In 1957 Crowley had started working for a number of television production companies, before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film Splendor in the Grass[5] while working as a production assistant.[6] Wood hired him as her assistant,[6] primarily to give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play The Boys in the Band.[7][8] Wood, Crowley’s close friend, inspired him to move from New York to Hollywood.[9] According to Crowley’s friend Gavin Lambert, Wood sympathized with Hollywood’s gay scene, and financially supported Crowley[6][10] so he would be free to write his play.[11] Crowley worked as an assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years.[6]
After several Hollywood film productions he was helping on were canceled, his wealthy friend Diana Lynn hired him to housesit. He lived in the Hollywood Georgian Mansion where he only had to “throw dinner parties and drink myself into oblivion.” He began writing instead of drinking, and began working on The Boys in the Band. According to Crowley, he had a droll friend he periodically would take wry comments from, and based the character of Michael on.[9]
Crowley told Dominick Dunne about the title: “It’s that line in A Star is Born when James Mason tells a distraught Judy Garland, ‘You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.’”[12]
According to Crowley, his motivation in writing the play was not activism, but anger that “had partially to do with myself and my career, but it also had to do with the social attitude of people around me, and the laws of the day.” He says he “wanted the injustice of it all — to all those characters — known.”[13] Crowley has also stated, “I was not an activist, then or now. I didn’t know what hit me. I just wrote the truth.”[9]
Crowley reminded himself of Michael, describing him as “a complex person who is aware of what is politically correct but has a sort of contempt for it.” He called Donald “a foil for Michael”[14] and inspired by Crowley’s friend.[6] In the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, Crowley explained, “The self-deprecating humor was born out of a low self-esteem, from a sense of what the times told you about yourself.”[15]

Stage Productions

1968 Premiere

While Crowley was pitching the script, early agents stayed away from the project, and it was championed by playwright Edward Albee and Richard Barr, who at the time was head of the Playwrights Units in New York.[9] For the production, it proved “nearly impossible to find” actors willing to play gay characters.[9] An old college friend of Crowley’s, 33-year-old Laurence Luckinbill, agreed to play Hank despite warnings from his agent that it would end his career, even though the agent was herself a lesbian. It was proved hard for Crowley find producers and theater owners who were interested. [16]
The play premiered Off-Broadway on April 14, 1968, at Theater Four,[17] and closed on September 6, 1970, after 1,001 performances.[14] Directed by Robert Moore, the cast included Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan McCarthy, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard. The play was one of the first works to present a story centered on homosexuals.[18] In 1968, although only originally scheduled to run for five performances at a small venue off Broadway, it was a fast success and was moved to a larger theater. It went on to have a run in London as well.[19] According to the New York Times, the premier’s actors such as Laurence Luckinbill drilled a hole in the set so they could spy on whoever was in the house’s best seats, and in the initial weeks, saw Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev, and New York mayor John Lindsay.[16] Despite the success of the play, all the gay members of the original company stayed in the closet after the premiere.[16] Between 1984 and 1993, five of the gay men in the original production, as well as the director Robert Moore and producer Richard Barr, all were killed in the AIDS crisis.[16]

Off-Broadway Revivals

The play was revived Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 1996, running from August 6 to October 20.[20]
The Boys in the Band was presented by the Transport Group Theater Company, New York City, from February 2010 to March 14, 2010, directed by Jack Cummings III.[1][3]
In 2002, Crowley wrote The Men from the Boys, a sequel to the play, which takes place 30 years after the original. The Men from the Boys premiered in San Francisco in 2002, directed by Ed Decker,[14] and was produced in Los Angeles in 2003.[21]
A revival went on stage in London in October 2016, as the first revival in two decades. It received a positive review from The Observer. It starred Mark Gatiss as Harold.[22]

Broadway Production

A Broadway production of The Boys in the Band, directed by Joe Mantello, opened in previews at the Booth Theatre on April 30, 2018, officially on May 31, and runs until August 11. This production, staged for the 50th anniversary of the play’s original premiere, stars Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto and Andrew Rannells, as well as Charlie Carver, Brian Hutchison, Michael Benjamin Washington, Robin de Jesús, and Tuc Watkins.[23][24] Quinto portrays Harold, whose birthday sets the premise.[25] All of the actors in the 2018 production are openly gay.[26]

Boys in the Band 2018

Broadway Run

Details – 35 Previews and Performances

Mart Crowley

Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After graduating from The Catholic University of America (Studying in acting and show business) in Washington, D.C. in 1957, Crowley headed west to Hollywood, where he worked for a number of television production companies before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film Splendor in the Grass. Wood hired him as her assistant, primarily to give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play The Boys in the Band, which opened off-Broadway on April 14, 1968 and enjoyed a run of 1,000 performances. Crowley became part of Wood’s inner circle of friends that she called “the nucleus”, whose main requirement was that they pass a “kindness” test.

Mart with Friend Natalie Wood

The Boys in the Band was adapted into a film in 1970 directed by William Friedkin. Crowley’s sequel to The Boys in the Band was entitled The Men from the Boys. Crowley also wrote and produced Remote Asylum and the autobiographical A Breeze from the Gulf.
In 1979 and 1980, Crowley served first as the executive script editor and then producer of the ABC series Hart to Hart, starring Wood’s husband Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. Other credits include the teleplays for There Must Be a Pony (1986), Bluegrass (1988), People Like Us (1990), and a reunion special of Hart to Hart in 1996.
Crowley has appeared in at least three documentaries: The Celluloid Closet (1995), about the depiction of homosexuality in cinema; Dominick Dunne: After the Party (2007), a biography of Crowley’s friend and producer Dominick Dunne; and Making the Boys (2011), a documentary about the making of The Boys in the Band.  Crowley is openly gay

Films

The Boys in the Band is a 1970 American drama film directed by William Friedkin. [27] The screenplay by Mart Crowley is based on his Off-Broadway play The Boys in the Band. It is among the first major American motion pictures to revolve around gay characters and is often cited as a milestone in the history of queer cinema, and is also thought to be the first mainstream American film to use the swear word cunt.

The ensemble cast, all of whom also played the roles in the play’s initial stage run in New York City, includes Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard. Model/actress Maud Adams has a brief cameo appearance as a fashion model in a photo shoot segment in the opening montage.

The Boys in the Band is a 2020 American drama film directed by Joe Mantello, based on the 1968 play of the same name by Mart Crowley and starring the original 1968 Off-Broadway cast. The film stars the full roster of players from the play’s 2018 Broadway revival, comprising a cast of exclusively openly-gay actors, such as Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Charlie Carver, Robin de Jesús, Brian Hutchison, Michael Benjamin Washington, and Tuc Watkins.

The film was released on September 30, 2020 on Netflix and received positive reviews from critics.

On April 18, 2019, Ryan Murphy announced that the play The Boys in the Band would be adapted for Netflix, as part of his US$300 million deal with the streaming platform. Murphy had previously revived the play for Broadway in 2018 and confirmed the director of the revival, Joe Mantello, would direct the film. David Stone and Ned Martel were announced as producers alongside Murphy. It was also confirmed that the entire cast of the 2018 Broadway revival would reprise their roles for the film, making the film have a cast of entirely openly gay actors

Reception

When The Boys in the Band premiered in 1968, mainstream audiences were shocked.[28] The play was profiled in the William Goldman book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, an account of the 1967-68 season. In the same year, a two-disc, vinyl LP set was released, containing the full dialogue of the play voiced by the original actors. Crowley wrote the sequel The Men from the Boys.
In 2002, Peter Filichia from Theater Mania contended that the play’s original production helped inspire the 1969 Stonewall riots and gay rights movement.[29]
After gays saw The Boys in the Band, they no longer would settle for thinking of themselves as pathetic and wouldn’t be perceived as such any longer. Now that [characters] had brought their feelings out of the closet, this new generation would dare to be different. And, just as some whites’ view of blacks changed after seeing A Raisin in the Sun, so too did the outlook of many straights after they caught The Boys in the Band. Some whom I personally know felt terrible and–I saw this happen!–actually changed the way they treated gays.
In 2004, David Anthony Fox from Philadelphia City Paper praised this play, its one-liners, and its live performance in Philadelphia. He rebutted criticism that the play portrayed “urban gay men as narcissistic, bitter, shallow”.[4]
In 2010, Elyse Summer in her review for Curtain Up called it a “smart gimmick” full of dated “self-homophobic, low self-esteem characters”.[3] In the same year, Steve Weinstein from the Edge website called it “Shakespearean”.[30]

Images

The Boys on Broadway 2018

Celebrating its 50th Anniversary, the fiercely funny and ground breaking play THE BOYS IN THE BAND was on Broadway for the first time ever in a strictly limited engagement First preview Apr 30th 2018 Opening night May 31 2018 and closed Aug 11 2018.

2018 gave us a very exciting cast, including JIM PARSONS (“The Big Bang Theory,” An Act of God), ZACHARY QUINTO (Star Trek, “American Horror Story”), MATT BOMER (The Normal Heart, “White Collar,” Magic Mike) and ANDREW RANNELLS (The Book of Mormon, “Girls”). The production also includes CHARLIE CARVER, ROBIN de JESÚS, BRIAN HUTCHISON, MICHAEL BENJAMIN WASHINGTON and TUC WATKINS, and is directed by Tony Award winner JOE MANTELLO (The Humans, Other Desert Cities, Wicked).

Opening Night 2018

Casts

Off Broadway 1968

Frederick Combs – Donald
Leonard Frey – Harold
Cliff Gorman – Emory
Reuben Greene – Bernard
Robert La Tourneaux – Cowboy
Laurence Luckinbill – Hank
Kenneth Nelson – Michael
Keith Prentice – Larry
Peter White – Alan
Bob Broadway – Bernard UNDERSTUDY
David Daniels – Michael UNDERSTUDY
Page Johnson – Harold / Emory UNDERSTUDY
Jered Mickey – Hank / Alan UNDERSTUDY

Off Broadway 1996

David Bishins – Hank
Robert Bogue – Alan
William Christian – Bernard
Scott Decker – Cowboy
David Drake – Michael
David Greenspan – Harold
James Lecesne – Emory
Sean McDermott – Larry
Christopher Sieber – Donald

Broadway 2018

Jim Parsons – Michael
Zachary Quinto – Harold
Matt Bomer – Broadway Debut Donald
Andrew Rannells – Larry
Charlie Carver – Broadway Debut Cowboy
Robin De Jesús – Emory
Brian Hutchison – Alan
Michael Benjamin Washington – Bernard
Tuc Watkins – Broadway Debut Hank
Standby: Matt McGrath (Emory, Harold, Michael), Curt Bouril (Alan, Hank), Sekou Laidlow (Bernard) and Kyle Dean Massey (Cowboy, Donald, Larry)

References

1. Ben Brantley (February 24, 2010). “Broken Hearts, Bleeding Psyches”. The New York Times.
2. Wild, Stephanie. “The Cast of ‘The Boys In The Band’ Shares Group Photo From First Day of Rehearsal” broadwayworld.com, April 1, 2018
3. Sommer, Elyse. ““The Boys in the Band review” CurtainUp.com February 19, 2010
4. Fox, David Anthony. The Boys in the Band review Archived February 21, 2013, at Archive.is. Philadelphia City Paper June 17, 2012. May 25, 2012
5. Wagner, Robert J. Pieces of My Heart. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. 138. Google Books. Web. 25 May 2012.
6. Roca 2002, p. 2.
7. Dunlap, David W. THEATER: In a Revival, Echoes of a Gay War of Words.” The New York Daily News 9 June 1996. Web. 25 May 2012.
8. Journey to an Overlooked Past – The New York Times – June 11, 2000
9. Octavio Rosa (October 26, 2002). “‘Boys’ to ‘Men’ / Mart Crowley’s latest play takes ‘Boys in the Band’ through the past 30 years”. SFGate.
10. Kinser, Jeffrey. “Mart Crowley on His Friend Natalie Wood.” Advocate November 23, 2011. Web. May 25, 2012.
11. Jaques, Damien (May 31, 1998). “‘Boys in Band’ returns to stage, tamer now but still honest, witty”. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
12. Robert Hofler: Sexplosion. From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange – How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, it-Books, 2014 New York, ISBN 978-0-06-208834-5.
13. Sherry Lucas (March 24, 2018). “Mississippi playwright’s ‘Boys in the Band’ marches triumphantly to Broadway”. Mississippi Today. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
14. Roca, Octavio (October 26, 2002). “‘Boys’ to ‘Men’: Mart Crowley’s latest play takes ‘Boys in the Band’ through the past 30 years”. TheSan Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved March 27, 2007.
15. Higleyman, Liz. “What was The Boys in the Band?” GMax.co.za February 6, 2004. Web. May 25, 2012 [1].
16. February 26, 2018 (February 26, 2018). “A Brief History of Gay Theater, in Three Acts”. The New York Times.
17. The Boys in the Band lortel.org, retrieved November 2, 2017
18. “Ryan Murphy taps Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto for ‘Boys in the Band’ Broadway revival”. EW.com. November 1, 2017. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
19. Olivia Clement (May 10, 2018). “Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Andrew Rannells, and Matt Bomer Lead The Boys in the Band on Broadway”. Playbill.com. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
20. ” ‘The Boys in the Band’ 1996″ lortel.org, retrieved November 2, 2017
21. Hitchcock, Laura (August 3, 2003). “Men From the Boys”. CurtainUp. Retrieved March 27, 2007.
22. Kate Kellaway (October 9, 2016). “The Boys in the Band review – stuff of great drama”. The Guardian. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
23. “Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Andrew Rannells, and Matt Bomer to Lead The Boys in the Band on Broadway | Playbill”. Playbill. Retrieved December 5, 2017.
24. Staff. “Introducing the First-Ever Broadway Cast of ‘The Boys in the Band’” theatermania.com, January 23, 2018
25. Neal Broverman (May 16, 2018). “Boy in the Band Zachary Quinto on the State of Gay”. The Advocate. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
26. Shane Michael Singh (May 1, 2018). “Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Andrew Rannells and Matt Bomer hit Broadway”. TimeOut. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
27. The Boys in the Band tcm.com, retrieved November 2, 2017
28. Warfield, Polly. “The Men from the Boys review Backstage: The Actor’s Resource July 31, 2003. Web. May 25, 2012.
29. Filichia, Peter. “Bring on the Men!” Theater Mania October 18, 2002
30. Weinstein, Steve. “Mart Crowley: The Man Behind the ’Boys’ “ Edge New York, February 12, 2010
31. Full references at Wiki