Review: Netflix’s The Boys in the Band Gives a Cultural Touchstone a Glossy Update

This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.

The Boys in the Band
Photo: Netflix

“Call you tomorrow,” says perpetually morose birthday boy Harold to his rapidly unraveling friend Michael at the climax of playwright Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking and still-litigated 1968 queer cultural touchstone The Boys in the Band. More than 50 years after those words were written, they still feel among the saddest, most intimate words of farewell ever uttered between two fictional characters.

In the wake of the success of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Crowley’s coup was to populate an entire play with modern homosexuals getting slowly hammered at a party and, eventually, doing exactly as George and Martha did with Honey and Nick: picking away at each other in a seemingly endless cycle of “get the guests” parlor games. None more so than Michael, the more-or-less central figure whose radiant sense of Catholic guilt—and discomfort with his receding hairline—have made a jet-setting, debt-amassing alcoholic of him.

It’s Michael that Crowley says he most identified with when writing the play. And that identification with the story’s most overtly abusive partygoer undoubtedly helped the play—and especially its eventual film adaptation directed by a then-up-and-coming William Friedkin—develop a fraught relationship with the gay community. Some spoke out against its purported implicit suggestion that all gay men are basket cases; others saw in the play’s depiction of outcasts defiling their own safe space with catty barbs something true about themselves. And some undoubtedly recognized both aspects working in merciless tandem.

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The best that can be said for Netflix’s new version is that there are surprisingly few recognizable touches from producer Ryan Murphy, who also produced director Joe Mantello’s Broadway revival. Foremost among those is the fact that Murphy and Mantello opted for a full slate of nine openly gay actors to take the stage, and keeps them all on board here. That triumph of representation aside, though, The Boys in the Band alternates between recreating Friedkin’s film—right down to the near-identical set design of Michael’s (Jim Parsons) apartment—and diverging in ways that end up cutting the tension, diffusing performances, and underlining points of a script that never lacked for declarative character.

Halfway through, Michael, having fallen off his six-week wagon and completing his turn into a queer Mr. Hyde, takes the reins of his party and forces his friends to play a sadistic game of telephone, making each of them call their one true love and come clean about their feelings. It’s during this second act that each actor would normally be given their chance to dig deep, laying bare the memories that still haunt their tortured adult lives. Here, though, Mantello frequently cuts away from their monologues for florid flashbacks, just at the point where the audience should feel the air leaking out of that claustrophobic living room. Equally superfluous is a coda that shows where each character goes after the party disbands, literalizing Michael’s monologue about running through life.

Which is to say, a filmed version of the revival would have done better justice to it. Even so, there are enough performances herein to have made any act of preservation worth the bother, most notably Tony-nominated Robin de Jesús as the camp-quipping Emory (an admittedly juicy part that Hoovers up the spotlight, as it did for Cliff Gorman in the original), and Andrew Rannells as the rampantly unfaithful Larry, whose unwillingness to submit to his lover Hank’s (Tuc Watkins) pleas to at least include him in threesomes rather than stepping out behind his back represents the play’s most fascinating variation on self-defeating behavior. And while Zachary Quinto, as Harold, lacks Leonard Frey’s exquisitely simmering sense of self-loathing, when it counts (“Call me tomorrow”), he rises to the material.

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In reviving the play on Broadway and transposing the exact cast to a new film adaptation, much as Friedkin did back in 1970, Mantello could arguably have very easily updated the timestamp on the material and set his hostile revelers against each other in present-day New York. There’s enough flexibility in the premise to highlight just how far gay rights have come while at the same time acknowledging the restraints many gay men still fight against, expertly outlined by Alan Downs in The Velvet Rage. But that he didn’t suggests he’s among those who view Crowley’s play as a time capsule, if not outright antiquated, rendering the whole enterprise of preserving the stage version in film form weirdly self-amplifying. This Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.

Score: 
 Cast: Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Tuc Watkins, Robin de Jesús, Michael Benjamin Washington, Charlie Carver, Brian Hutchison  Director: Joe Mantello  Screenwriter: Mart Crowley, Ned Martel  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 122 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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