A selection of queer stories
A good way to celebrate Pride is by heading to Audible, which has a well-curated L.G.B.T.Q. selection. New this month is Hunter Bird and Mason Alexander Park’s “The Pansy Craze” — a series of shows presented live at the Minetta Lane Theater last year and now being released in six chapters. Park (who has played the lead character in “Oh, Mary!” in London) and various guests proceeded to tell fairly obscure queer stories from the Victorian era to the more recent past. An episode, for example, is dedicated to the 1970s “gender illusionist” Jim Bailey (with guest Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and another covers glam rock (with guest Evan Rachel Wood).
Audible’s catalog also features two large-scale plays with gay themes. Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is available with the cast of the National Theater revival (which was on Broadway in 2018), including Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane and Lee Pace. Matthew López’s “The Inheritance” (on Broadway in 2019) follows gay men’s lives across generations and is in conversation with both “Angels in America” and E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.”
‘La Cage Aux Folles’
Stream it on Apple Music or Spotify.
As the Encores! series prepares for its production of this Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman musical on June 17-28, you can prep by listening to the original Broadway cast recording, from 1983, with George Hearn as the extroverted Albin (the role to be played by Billy Porter this month) and Gene Barry as his patient partner, Georges (that will be Wayne Brady). If you prefer a relatively more recent take, the 2010 revival starring Douglas Hodge and Kelsey Grammer is also easily available.
‘Romeo and Juliet’
If you can’t make it to Shakespeare in the Park’s new production of the greatest doomed love story of them all (through June 28 at the Delacorte Theater), adaptations of the play are plentiful on various platforms. Franco Zeffirelli’s pageant of a movie (available on most major platforms) is faithful to the text, with a lushness that transcends the decades — it came out in 1968. A more recent, more singular take on the play is Simon Godwin’s hybrid of stage and film for the National Theater, starring Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley. Shot during the pandemic, this slimmed-down version moves at a fleet pace that underscores the sense of youth hurtling headlong into tragedy.
Liza Minnelli at 80
On June 25 at Carnegie Hall, the Transport Group company is celebrating Liza Minnelli with the one-night-only song-and-dance celebration “Liza! at 80.” This is as good an excuse as any to revisit some of Minnelli’s classic performances in filmed concerts. Tubi alone has three of them available for free: the dynamite “Liza With a ‘Z’” (1972), which was directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse; “An Evening With Liza Minnelli” (1980), recorded live in New Orleans; and “Liza in London,” which was recorded at the Palladium and aired on HBO in 1986.
‘Wuthering Heights’
As Emerald Fennell’s divisive movie adaptation of this Emily Brontë novel hits HBO Max, you may want to check out a rather different version by the imaginative director Emma Rice (“Brief Encounter”): a theatrical staging that was filmed in 2021 at the Bristol Old Vic in Britain. In her review of the Brooklyn run for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes described the production as “a feat of storytelling that wraps itself around the audience, pulling us into its silliness and sorrow.”
‘Barefoot in the Park’
Richard Thomas — a recent Tony Award nominee for his performance in the David Lindsay-Abaire comedy “The Balusters” — has had a long stage career, and thanks to YouTube we can explore some of his past performances. One of them was a production of the Neil Simon play “Barefoot in the Park” that was recorded in front of a live audience then broadcast on HBO in March 1982. Thomas and Bess Armstrong play the newlywed Paul and Corie Bratter, who have just moved into the bohemian (read: in poor shape) top floor of a Manhattan walk-up and learn to figure out their new life together — he is a junior lawyer and she is a proto-manic pixie dream girl. Even in less than optimal viewing conditions, you can see that Thomas and Armstrong have believable, and very funny, chemistry — though the secret sauce is Barbara Barrie, impeccably droll as Corie’s mother.
