PHOTO: DANIEL FUNES PRODUCTIONS
Join us for an evening of some of the very best and most cherished love songs from the Broadway canon. These are the songs that endure in places like piano bars where people get together to sing and to celebrate their favorite tunes. (Okay — one of the places. But this ain't no karaoke bar.) This is one concert that celebrates the songs themselves, and also the relationship we've developed over the years with these classics. What they meant to us then, and what they mean now.
We've tried to recreate the feel of a comfortable lounge where show tunes are the lingua franca. These familiar lyrics are the vocabulary by which we express ourselves, and re-discover the pleasures of falling in love. So a piano bar ambience is the natural setting in which our cast of six talented guys can sing their hearts out for you, and share a few laughs between the songs.
The piano bar is a unique institution that's a kind of in-between, twilight world. Most significantly, it is a place situated between the performance space of theatre, and the everyday world where you go about the business of having a life. In a piano bar, you are both performer and audience. You play different roles at different times.
In post-WWII America, the piano bar was a place where show queens congregated and found respite from a mainstream culture in which gender roles were especially stultifying and oppressive. It was also a time when Broadway held out, at least in some small way, alternative visions in which strong women characters – embodied on stage by larger than life divas – could triumph in the world. (There was also a lot of caving in to conventions, but that's material for another show.) Much of the music we use in our revue originated in this period.
For our purposes, the important issue is that Broadway celebrated having a rich emotional life, romantic fantasies, magical visions of other places and cultures, and men were not considered freaks because they loved to sing and dance and dress up. And piano bars were places where people who embraced the world of the stage were able to connect (and embrace each other).
In our fractured post-modern world, these bars do not serve the same purpose of allowing outsiders to “find” one another. But they do celebrate the same qualities that afficionadoes of musical theatre have always found attractive. These bars remain important places where first and foremost, people can go to relax, have fun, and generally have a good time. They are places where friendships are cultivated, popular musical culture is celebrated, and you can still keep a wandering eye open for potential new tricks.
These are also places where young queer people can go and gain knowledge of a gay culture that is not necessarily reflected in the media. We still build our identities in part based on the people we come in contact with and the information they pass on from their own lives. And we all still need places where we can express who we are in our own unique way and be appreciated for what we have to offer. Piano bars are particularly well-suited to provide opportunities for self-expression and to offer appreciation of the risks taken and talents put on display by ourselves and others.
So our own little piano bar is primarily a place to delight in some of America's musical gems, a place where the craftsmanship of songwriters and performers from another era can be fully appreciated, a place where musical treasures of the past are learned and enjoyed even as they are adapted to the changing tastes and culture of the present moment.
This is the in-between world we celebrate in our show – that unique space where the fantasy life of theatre and real life intersect. Where people are accepted for who they are, and where the present connects to a rich past. The piano bar provides a rich metaphor for that space.
So come join us for an evening filled with the music you love, performed by a group of guys you're gonna love.
Cass Brayton, Director
