Tales of the City: A New Musical, and: The Normal Heart (review)

There is a scene in the middle of the first act of the enormously appealing musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City where a group of out gay men, all of whom imagine themselves on the social A-list, forecast their retirement at the “Homosexual Convalescent Center” (HCC). In their minds, the HCC is a place where gay men can live sexually liberated lives as senior citizens indulging in all that San Francisco’s gay urban culture enables. Rather than retreat back into a life of repression and the closet, these men anticipate a future filled with endless orgies, hunky hustlers, and the ongoing promiscuity to which they have become accustomed. This campy and irreverent number allows the men from the ensemble to take center stage and sing about a future made possible by gay liberation. From the audience’s perspective, they are an anonymous and nearly interchangeable set of homosexuals who, as the chorus, represent the musical’s gay social world. Even the lead male character, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, a young gay man coming into political consciousness in this milieu, initially observes them from a distance. Eventually this song of seduction does its trick and Michael and his new boyfriend Jon join the dance and witty repartee. By the end of the number, everyone shares the song’s sentiments, suggesting that we in the audience will also. The setting is San Francisco during the late 1970s, a time in the immediate aftermath of Stone-wall—the modern marker for gay liberation—when the potential for gay pleasure seemed endless. This exciting new musical, written by Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q), with songs by Jake Shears and John Garden (of the band Scissor Sisters), and directed by Jason Moore (Avenue Q) beautifully captures this period without falling into the trap of nostalgia. The show is not, by any means, a jukebox musical inspired by and dependent on the soundtrack of the 1970s. The characters build foundations for their future lives, daring to imagine new forms of kinship and community without any sense of the horror of AIDS, which would begin to ravage San Francisco only a few years later. The musical presents San Francisco as a place of profound personal transformation, and the 1970s as a time of radical social change.

Tales of the City had its world premiere in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater, one of the most esteemed regional theatres in the United States, during the summer of 2011 and thirty years into the AIDS epidemic. Concurrent with Tales, Larry Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart was playing on Broadway at the Golden Theatre. Documenting the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s, Kramer’s play serves as a companion piece to Tales of the City, picking up at precisely the moment where the musical ends and bringing audiences up to the time period of the mid-1980s. Now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, nearly thirty years after the final scenes of The Normal Heart, these moments from the recent past staged in our contemporary moment provided an occasion for us to reflect on what has been gained and what lost since the onslaught of AIDS. Both productions also begged a set of related questions: What was being revived in these theatres, and why revisit these two particular works of queer history in 2011?

Mary Birdsong (Mona Ramsey) and Wesley Taylor (Michael “Mouse” Tolliver) in Tales of the City: A New Musical. (Photo: Kevin Berne.)

Essentially a love letter to San Francisco, Tales of the City is a reminder of the city’s role in creating an alternative sense of community for the diverse individuals who migrated to...