Nick Green in "Dancing Queen"
Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, but no need to wonder where Sky Gilbert is. The Hamiltonian playwright is making his annual end-of-season stop at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times to premiere another frustrating new work.
In Dancing Queen, Gilbert takes a gander at the gay generation gap through an utterly unsuccessful juxtaposition of theatre and dance.
Alan, a wannabe writer in his early 20s played by a fresh-faced, uptalking Nick Green, moves to Toronto from Northern Ontario and quickly gets enmeshed in the lives of two older men.
After a night at a cheesy dance club, Alan heads home with the handsome and suave Bart (David-Benjamin Tomlinson). What Bart intended as a business-like one-night stand, however, goes awry when his young pick-up becomes infatuated with him.
Meanwhile, Alan arranges a lunch meeting with a successful writer he idolizes named Calder (Ryan Kelly). He's looking for mentorship, but Calder seems primarily interested in getting him in the sack. Calder is tremendously conflicted about potentially abusing this young person's trust, but nevertheless keeps putting the moves on the uninterested Alan.
These intergenerational interactions play out in a series of straightforward scenes that are then followed by tongue-in-cheek pas de deux.
Choreographed by performance artist Keith Cole, these fantasy dance interludes take place up and down a giant staircase designed by Andy Moro. The characters reappear dressed in straw boater hats in front of a projected backdrop that conjures an idyllic past.
The relationships are then rehashed through slapstick, sword fights and a hint of ballet, all set to melodramatic musical selections by mid-century film and radio composer Charles Williams.
It all falls utterly flat, the fatal flaw being that these scenes do not tell us anything new about the characters, but simply repeat and reiterate what was just seen in the realistic scenes.
If this concept was ever going to work, it would need zippy transitions between drama and dance, but Gilbert employs excruciatingly long blackouts instead. The playwright's uninventive, hesitant direction of his own work is simply not up to the high standard we see these days at Buddies, the queer theatre he co-founded in 1978.
What makes Dancing Queen frustrating rather than simply bad is that the written portion of the play, while in need of a haircut, is solidly acted by the three leading men and comes across as a timely metaphor for the economic reality that Generation Y is being screwed by the older generations.
There's also an intriguing exploration of the differences between gay men who have grown up in a society that has become both more open and more conservative and their elders. Alan does not seem to have any anxiety around his sexuality – indeed, he confesses he came out when he was 10 years old. The younger man is looking to be in a monogamous relationship and get married, however, while the older men are each in open relationships with long-term lovers. Gilbert – surprisingly given his personal views – doesn't take a side.
Dancing Queen also features a neat twist near the end that I didn't see coming that then leads to the play's best scene, in which Calder demonstrates a neurotic self-loathing worthy of a Tony Kushner play. What could have been a tight one-act, however, is a self-indulgent disaster due to the dance breaks.
Dancing Queen runs until April 29.
Dancing Queen
- Written and directed by Sky Gilbert
- Choreographed by Keith Cole in collaboration with Sky Gilbert
- Starring Nick Green
- At Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto
J. Kelly Nestruck