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‘The Boys in the Band’: A Queer History Lesson With Plenty of Shade
The Industry Oct 02, 2020
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Scott Everett White/Netflix Jim Parsons as Michael and Matt Bomer as Donald in ‘The Boys in the Band’. The Boys in the Band — directed by Joe Mantello and produced by, among others, Ryan Murphy — isn’t always good, but it’s a good time. The project is a tough prospect, in some ways. The movie adapts Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play, an Upper East Side drama whose characters are entirely comprised of gay men, men whose desires and conflicts and forms of expression are inherently their own — whose lives and complications, fully on display here, had up until to that point usually been relegated to the background, if they were ever told at all. That’s the explicit meaning by the title, in fact, which is, appropriately, a quote from an iconic Judy Garland movie: A Star is Born (1954). “You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band,” as James Mason put it to Garland’s struggling starlet, and as Crowley’s play — loyally adapted here with glossiness and occasionally even some style — puts it to us now. It’s a winking, coded line in the first place, immediately recognizable, to the people who’ve known how to hear […]
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