A Gay Shrek of Some Importance
This installment of kaylasomething is brought to you in part by and preparation of the Jimmy Awards, a national high school musical theatre competition where kids compete on a Broadway stage for scholarship money, that I will be attending with MCBFM (defined further down) later this month. It may be hard for some of you to see me like this (theater kid in full rage) and I just want you to know it is difficult for me to tame the embarrassing dweeb inside day-in-day-out. Sometimes, she demands to be here. She’s like Jekyll and Hyde, the 1990 musical. She’s like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, feed me Seymour and all that jazz… Oh god, it’s already started. Take your seats, turn off your cellphones, and enjoy the show.
My new comfort Youtube video is Steven Pasquale singing “The Streets of Dublin” from A Man of No Importance for MisCast, MCC Theater’s annual gala where Broadway starlets perform songs they’d never be cast to perform for real (usually because of a silly little thing called gender).
Singing parts meant for male voices has never phased me, and truthfully I often prefer to because I sang Tenor I parts in my high school choir and acapella group (brag much? Slay much?) to fill in for the lack of enthusiastic boys signing up for either program. Once, during a middle school hangout, me and a girl I will call Katie were jumping on the trampoline in her backyard when she asked me if I could sing all of Danny’s parts in Grease to her because she knew that I could. I felt so flattered. Of course I could. Of course I did!
If I were to perform at MisCast, here are the selections that float to the top - the ones I would send over to the director for consideration:
The zest with which I would belt out the line “I left Columbia and I don’t regret it!” while never having the chance to attend nor leave Columbia. It’s called acting, baby! The idea of flipping Jamie from a toxic man into a toxic lesbian is almost too tantilizing of a daydream for me. True equality is having as many gay villians (Smaug from The Hobbit) as gay heroes (Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings) in our media. I would have too much fun as Jamie, the devilish half of a disastrous couple that should’ve broken up after a few months of dating tops. The Last Five Years tells the story of a 5 year relationship and marriage with that narrative moving forward through the experiences of its boyish half, Jamie, and backwards for failing (though increasingly optimistic because of the timeline twist) actress, Cathy, meeting in the middle only once at their wedding. It’s a classic and there’s even a movie (available on HBO Max) for those of you whose interest may be piqued. I have loved Jason Robert Brown musicals for as long as I’ve loved musical theatre and even wrote the man two (2) fangirlish emails that went deservingly/devastatingly unanswered. Perhaps he would write me back after seeing me bring the house down at MisCast?
When we were still teenagers, I would beg MCBFM (my college boyfriend, Michael) to sing a gender-swapped version of this duet with me. When I say my college boyfriend, I must clarify that we never dated, but are extremely close, both gay, and were believed to have been dating by my mother for several years - hence, MCBFM. He always refused, but perhaps for MisCast he would reconsider. In our reimagination for the gala, we could update the back and forth that immediately follows the big, fire escape kiss. Street rat paperboy turned face-of-a-movement, Jack Kelly, says, “If things were different…” and in the original show, journalist-undercover newspaper heiress, Katherine Plummer, replies, “if you weren’t going to Santa Fe,” but instead could say, “if you weren’t gay…” and Jack, instead of “and if you weren’t an heiress…” could also say, “if you weren’t gay…” Can you just imagine the laughter ripping through that crowd? I will dream them up to fall asleep tonight.
I can’t even pretend this isn’t my first choice. I would sing this at a karaoke bar if I wasn’t 100% certain someone would start clobbering me for being annoying (which unfortunately doesn’t stop me from singing “Drops of Jupiter” almost every time). This tender Act I showstopper gives our ogre hero, yes - Shrek, the ability to limitlessly muse about all the dreams he has for himself, each pathway rendered impossible due to his ogre status, which forces him to hideaway in the dark, all alone. From a hero in battle to a poet consulting the moon, Shrek nails the queerest feeling of all: yearning. The song paints a story of acceptance, one where Shrek removes his helmet and isn’t rejected but is able to “speak of love” and “feel the stars ascending.” I mean… c’mon now. This is meant to be sung by a gay woman, and I’d be happy to do it at MisCast23 with Ariana DeBose as Princess Fiona and Jenn Colella as Donkey - a whole queer affair!
Anyway, Steven’s selection is from a role he played 20 years ago, so the joke of the miscasting is his age. Pasquale mentions this in jest and goes on to refer to Christine Baranski as simply “Baranski” like she’s the wide receiver on the football team instead of a beloved actress with big dick energy.
Endlessly charismatic, when he opens his mouth to sing, Pasquale has a voice that literally feels like lotion sinking into every one of your pores at the same exact time. “The Streets of Dublin” takes its time to lyrically immerse its audience in the people and places found around town as the song’s vessel, a young man named Robbie, dismisses the offer to play John the Baptist in an amateur production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, citing that theater bores him while the characters and scenes of his actual life entertain him just fine.
He sings, when I need a poem, the streets and the gutters will do! And goes on to describe the drunks, the buskers, and even the parks of Dublin - the beautiful, mundane and real (dude would love Sherwood Anderson). In my opinion, it’s composer Stephen Flaherty’s masterpiece which might sound like crazy talk considering it has to contend with “Waiting for Life” from Once On This Island and “Wheels of a Dream” from Ragtime… okay, I take it back. It’s Stephen Flaherty’s third-best masterpiece, which is still pretty impressive. 20 years later and Pasquale sounds exactly the same as he does in the 2003 Lincoln Center recording, if not better.
An adorable Easter egg in this performance: amongst the other seated performers off to the side sits a beaming Kelli O’Hara, who played opposite Steven in Jason Robert Brown’s (a second shoutout, it’s like I’m desperate or something) adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County. If you don’t have a stomachache from all the musical theatre just yet, I can’t recommend selections from this very odd, deeply romantic musical meant for middle-aged mothers stuck in unexciting marriages living in the middle of nowhere desperate for a brief and passionate affair with a National Geographic photographer (or something equally exotic) enough.
It makes all the hairs on my arms stand at attention! Easy soldiers. Doesn’t it make you want to be in love? Will you be upset if I tell you Steven Pasquale wasn’t even nominated for a Tony that year? Holding for you to process that. One of the biggest mistakes in history, I think… Listen, I won’t shittalk Andy Karl or the Rocky musical in this newsletter because one time I walked by him and Orfeh on a Manhattan sidewalk and felt so starstruck, but also because I’ve been praising the work of Stephen Flaherty for paragraphs and to undo that now would be cruel. If that sentence is confusing to you, you’re better off.
I’m keeping it short and sweet this week because I got my second Covid booster and feel my left arm descending towards the pits of hell with each character typed. I’ve also been so busy with work that I keep having these out-of-body experiences where I think, “I was at home this morning and now I’m at a desk in a totally different zip code. How did I get here!? My own two feet? In what world…”
I hope you like Steven Pasquale if you didn’t before. I hope you like the lyric “the lamps in the park look like god in the dark as they glow.” I hope I haven’t completely scared you away with the theatre jabbering - though I cannot promise it will stop. In fact, I can guarantee you that it won’t. With the aforementioned Jimmy Awards less than 2 weeks away, I’m feral.
I don’t have anything particularly fun to say about the Tony Awards from this past Sunday, besides the fact that my twin brother decided to watch with me from another state without being asked. We texted throughout the broadcast and he asked me about a song from Spring Awakening during their reunion performance. It’s the kind of moment you don’t hold your breath for, something so left-field that you must wonder, “does anyone else have ‘explain Spring Awakening to your brother more than 10 years after you would blast the cast recording daily in your shared household’ on their Bingo card?” But maybe that’s just me.
Big love,
kaylasomething