Gulp! The Gay Beach Musical at Buffalo United Artists
Review by Anthony Chase
Imagine a time before marriage equality. A time when being open about your homosexuality might mean being disowned by your family and the people who were supposed to love you most. A time before AIDS. A time when dancing in a club with a partner of your own gender, or dressing in the attire of the opposite gender, could get you arrested. Imagine a time when nobody had ever seen a same sex kiss on television, except maybe if the Late Show was featuring Marlene in her 1930 film, Morocco. Imagine a time when everyone knew who Marlene was, and that her name had three syllables.
Gulp! The Gay Beach Musical takes us back to such a time.
For Vinny Murphy, director of the current BUA revival, the project is a passion and an act of activist preservation. Murphy is a young actor/director with a fascination for theater of the past, and in his research he came across references to Gulp!, an off-Broadway hit from 1977 that had somehow slipped through the cracks: unpublished, unrecorded, unavailable in any licensing catalog, and last given even an amateur staging in a bar in Houston in 1987.
Its co-creator John Glines died in 1998, but his co-writer, Stephen Greco, is still living, and Murphy tracked him down. He also located the Glines archive at Yale, which obligingly scanned surviving materials; from these, BUA reconstructed the score and script (with lyrics by Glines and Robin Jones) for this production, the first the show has seen in nearly forty years. Greco, delighted for the Gulp! to be resurrected, sent a spectacular bouquet of orchids, roses, and calla lilies for opening night.
It's Coney Island on Gay Liberation Day, June 28th, 1977, the eighth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and a closeted lifeguard named Homer is saved, over and over, by five gleefully eccentric characters, including the man who loves him.
Gulp! grew out of The Glines, the not-for-profit organization John Glines founded in 1976 with Barry Laine and Jerry Tobin to create and present gay art, developing positive self-images and dispelling negative stereotyping. Within a decade The Glines would become one of the essential incubators of queer theater in America: its production of Torch Song Trilogy won the 1983 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor and the Drama Desk Award for Best Play, and its production of As Is took the 1985 Drama Desk Award for Best Play. Gulp! is an early, scrappier entry in that same body of work, made before the organization had any of those laurels to its name, but was already on the road toward them.
Fascinatingly, Gulp! is a reworking of an earlier John Glines musical, God Bless Coney Island, which played the Orpheum in 1972 and got a brief run and a sour notice from Mel Gussow in the New York Times. The bones of the two shows are the same: a suicidal lifeguard on a stand, a priest with a hive-inducing food allergy who is revealed to be something other than what he seems, a meddling comic figure with a horse-playing spouse, and a music-hall sister act reprised out of nowhere.
But the differences tell the whole story of what happened to this material, and to John Glines, over the five years between the two versions. The 1972 lifeguard was unhappily married to a woman and dreaming of being an architect; the 1977 lifeguard is a closeted gay man frightened by his dreams of Homer. The earlier show's priest, allergic to ham, discovers he's secretly Jewish; the later show's priest, allergic to hot dogs, is secretly a hired killer with a soft spot for a newspaperman. Bastille Day becomes Gay Liberation Day. A show set nowhere in particular becomes a show set explicitly at Stonewall's anniversary, with an activist anthem to close it out. Glines took a show that a critic could shrug off as tinkly cocktail piano and a disposable book, embraced its post-Stonewall moment, and rebuilt it, five years later, into something that knew exactly what it wanted to say and to whom.
This is not a Pulitzer Prize contender. The plot exists mostly to introduce songs and new characters. The score, here entirely piano-orchestrated, at times recalls the music for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and at other times Harvey Schmidt's music for The Fantasticks. It has romantic, soulful ballads alongside whimsical camp numbers, and ends with the full company raising a proud, unambiguous anthem of gay liberation. The message of the evening, unmistakably, is that it's wonderful to be gay. At the same time, it's a genuine time capsule of an earlier moment in gay history, one that turns at points into a Cherry Grove-style revue, complete with a bit of old vaudeville.
Corey Bieber is charming as guileless Homer, the handsome lifeguard afraid of his hidden desires. Robert McKnight sings brilliantly and proves captivating as the earnestly lovelorn Chris. They make the requisitely adorable romantic couple, and give the show a compelling core.
Ryan Blunt is a show-stealer as the boisterous, campy Teddy, an unapologetically nelly combination of the old pansy acts of yesteryear melded to Shelley Winters and Ethel Merman.
Michael Flanagan's Father William is a delicious caricature straight from vaudeville, entering with an over-exuberant “Throw Out the Lifeline,” inexplicably but wonderfully joined by Teddy on the chorus.
Matt Rittler, always polished and precise as he sings and dances, gives a Southern twang and brilliant comic physicality to Birdie. Zachary Kushner is goofily charismatic as Manny, the straight-looking but gay-acting hunk of a construction worker, giving the man a touch of manly restraint even as he navigates his song and dance routines with grace.
Murphy's direction is a model of good pacing, hitting the right notes at the dramatic, romantic, and activist climaxes alike. Keeping the proceedings boisterous and bright, he punctuates period-specific references (Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, Mark Spitz, Norman Vincent Peale) with a light and precise touch, and embraces period dialogue that still refers to the Stonewall Uprising as the Stonewall Riot rather than smoothing it over. A threatened suicide, a ubiquitous trope of early gay theater, is played here strictly for laughs. It's an element sure to make any unwitting Gen Z audience member cringe, but Murphy takes it in stride. The result is a steady, respectful, and entertaining rendering of a slice of gay theater history.
Steve Harter's set, which has a very homemade feel, is especially good, setting up both the tone and space needed for the fluid entrances and exits the comedy needs, establishing the beach with a prominent lifeguard tower, and culminating in a colorful fireworks display. Brenna Prather's costumes are character-appropriate and lend a playful snap. Nicole Cimato's excellent choreography is playfully clever and joyful, as it cleanly advances the story without overburdening the slim confection of a plot. Music direction by Lucas Colon and Nikki Fae Dahlen is confident and energetic; harmonies are elevated by a cast that sings strongly.
Buffalo United Artists' production is a revival underscored with historical importance. As one of the earliest queer musicals in the history of the American musical, Gulp! comes after Boy Meets Boy in 1975, but predates landmark works like La Cage aux Folles, Rent, and Fun Home, and it had all but vanished, with no commercial cast recording and decades since it had a full production.
It is worth remembering, too, that this was gay theater made for gay audiences: an audience that thrilled at a same-sex kiss on stage, but was just as happy to watch the show detour into a bit of camp vaudeville, to enjoy a playful bit of nudity, or to roar with laughter when a character got his first glimpse of gay sex from a paper handbook, pre-internet. There is no pretense here of reaching out to anyone not already up for the silliness or in on the joke. This may not be a literary masterwork, but it was part of the trajectory that would, very soon, earn The Glines a Tony Award. BUA has worked to restore it as faithfully as possible while introducing it to a new generation, and in doing so has given this odd, sweet, unabashedly earnest piece of gay theatrical history a fighting chance at the place in the canon it has long deserved.
Gulp! The Gay Beach Musical, directed by Vinny Murphy, book by John Glines and Stephen Greco, music by John Glines, lyrics by John Glines and Robin Jones, set by Steve Harter, costumes by Brenna Prather, choreography by Nicole Cimato, music direction by Lucas Colon and Nikki Fae Dahlen. Starring Corey Bieber, Robert McKnight, Ryan Blunt, Michael Flanagan, Matt Rittler, and Zachary Kushner. At Buffalo United Artists through September 27.
