‘The Big Gay Jamboree’ Off Broadway Review: This Show Is Even Queerer Than Its Title
This is awkward. Here’s a review of a new musical where the star of the show canceled. Since you’ve probably never heard of Marla Mindelle anyway and her stand-in Cortney Wolfson delivers a terrific performance, I can heartily recommend “The Big Gay Jamboree” with only that tiniest of reservations: I didn’t see Mindelle. This delightfully dirty new musical had its world premiere Sunday at the Orpheum Theatre.
Mindelle may have missed the preview I saw, but she’s all over “Jamboree,” having co-written the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the songs with Philip Drennen. She is also a major force in the equally bonkers musical “Titanique,” which continues its long run elsewhere off-Broadway.
Mindelle isn’t just gay friendly. She’s gay obsessed. With Parks-Ramage and Drennen, she delivers a musical set in Bareback, Idaho. Actually, the show is set in an off-Broadway theater that is probably the Orpheum and she – or Wolfson at the performance I saw – plays a straight woman named Stacey who is trapped in a gay-themed musical from which she cannot escape.
In the first couple of scenes, beyond the joke of a hick town named Bareback, it’s difficult to tell the story of the musical in which Stacey is trapped. The townspeople appear ready to perform in the original production of “Oklahoma!” – Sarah Cubbage designed the frightfully colorful costumes – and they sing nothing but gospel songs.
Stacey, who majored in musical theater, brings another kind of sound to Bareback circa a long time ago. She performs one of those caterwauling “Defying Gravity” female power ballads, and right on cue, the audience at the Orpheum Theatre broke into rapturous applause. When the ovation has finally subsided, one of the citizens of Bareback comments, “We never heard that style before.” Stacey tells them, “It’s called contemporary musical theater.” And another chorister pipes up, in the sweetest voice, ”It’s so… ugly.”
This is the moment early in “Jamboree” that the show won me over completely. I never did learn the plot of the musical in which Stacey is trapped. No matter. Mindelle and Drennen may not be the next Sondheim, but they know how to send-up the current sorry state of most Broadway musicals. They are also blessed with a couple of star performers who deserve the Tony even if they aren’t eligible.
There is not a better voice on Broadway right now than the stupendous baritone that Paris Nix brings to the role of Stacey’s love interest.
Constantine Rousouli is another “Titanique” performer and co-creator who achieved the nearly impossible feat in that show of being both deeply funny and sexy as a half-used tube of K-Y Jelly. Rousouli tops himself (no pun intended) in “Jamboree” when he delivers a brilliant parody of “The Music and the Mirror” from “A Chorus Line.”
I’ve been going to theater in New York City for over 50 years, and never has the talent pool of musical talent among actors been this wide and this deep. Wolfson taking over for Mindelle at the last moment in previews is proof of that, while Nix and Rousouli just add to my amazement.
The book for “Jamboree” finally catches up to its awesomely talented performers when the story begins to borrow not from musical theater but “The Stepford Wives.”
Insanity is alive and well and taking up residence at the Orpheum Theatre.
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