Reactionary old pop queen Elton John is certainly doing his part to ensure that gays will make up at least 10 percent of future American populations with his relentless campaign to make Broadway—currently saddled with awful heterosexual/asexual productions like Spring Awakening, Jersey Boys, and Mary Poppins—more aggressively gay. He bombed a few years ago with his musical adaptation of Anne Rice’s Lestat novel, but not because it was too gay (which it probably was). In the words of a young female Broadway enthusiast who sat next to me last year at Grey Gardens and attended one of the very few performances of Lestat before it was mercifully withdrawn from public view and burnt at the stake, “It was so horrible I couldn’t stop laughing.”
Obviously I’m really sad I missed that, but wild gay horses couldn’t drag me to see John’s latest project, Billy Elliot, which just looks exhausting. The movie was cute, but a production full of young wide-eyed boys singing about wanting to dance sounds dangerously twee.
My advice for Elton John is this: honeybee, you’re working with material that is already as gay as the day is long. You need to challenge yourself. For your next musical, how about adapting, say, Triumph of the Will, All the President’s Men, or Gandhi? Stretch those gay muscles of yours.
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