![]() ![]() He’d been a dancer on the ‘60s pop-music show And Michael Bennett, who mastermindedĪ Chorus Line, was at the top of his form staging Dreamgirls. It’s one of the legendary performances in Broadway history. The clip from the Tony Awards show that year – it gives you a pretty good idea of how intense and astonishing she was. The rest of the original cast was pretty damn good, but she brought down the house every night at the end of act one with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” You may have seen on YouTube Torch Song Trilogy, in which Harvey Fierstein plays a romantically masochistic character whose body image and cultural references exist in opposition to the gay culture of disco and drugs.) But mostlyĭreamgirls had to do with a whole bunch of exciting young black performers in fabulous costumes doing crisp, catchy numbers that knowingly referred to Motown and its musical sources while simultaneously commenting on the action of the play.įor one thing, there was Jennifer Holliday, who was a force of nature all by herself. (The white gay equivalent to the Effie White story is It had something to do with the Ugly Duckling and Sleeping Beauty andĪll About Eve. It had something to do with the new possibilities of fame and fortune in the post-industrial mass-media age. It’s the energy thing, some cross between Disney fairy-tale and Joseph Campbell-style heroic archetype, that Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger wanted to make a Broadway musical about.ĭreamgirls had something to do with race in America, with black pride and economic self-empowerment. I mean, tons of singers are as good or better, but how many drag queens do Gladys Knight? Still, there’s something about Diana Ross, the little-bitty stick of a girl-woman with the little-bitty kittenish voice and the big eyes and the big hair, that has a cosmic energy of its own and comes to stand for so much more than pop songs. ![]() Everyone alive who’s ever been to a supermarket or Starbuck’s has mainlined “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and other Motown classics. You don’t have to have been present at the creation to be affected by Motown, either. Lying in bed with my transistor radio pressed against my ear late one Saturday night in 1964 (the one hour of the week you could get “The Hit Parade”), I heard those haunting handclaps and a voice out of the darkness moaning, “Baby, baby…baby, don’t leave me…ooh, please don’t leave me all by myself.” Where did our love go? Has any more profound question ever been uttered in the universe? I swear my first erotic experience, as a baby fag growing up on an Air Force base in Japan, had less to do with my genitals than with my first exposure to the Supremes. The show/the movie/the myth taps into the magic power of Motown (that insanely productive hit factory that, along with the Beatles, produced the soundtrack for life in the ‘60s), a power that is concentrated exponentially into the Supremes’ three-minute masterpieces. But the same mysterious alchemy by which chubby nerdy mamma’s boys all over the world identify with a spunky pubescent girl in pigtails and a checked gingham dress singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” seems to operate inside the mythic landscape of Lord knows, gay guys aren’t the only people in the world who love the Supremes or the Broadway show loosely based on their story. #DREAMGIRLS EFFIE MOVIE#Here’s a movie made by two white gay guys (writer-director Bill Condon and producer Laurence Mark) based on a Broadway musical made by a bunch of other white gay guys (director-choreographer Michael Bennett, playwright-lyricist Tom Eyen, composer Henry Krieger, and producer David Geffen) loosely based on the real-life story of four young black women from Detroit in the early ‘60s whose singing group crosses over from R&B to Top 40 and launches the superstardom of their lead singer. Wait til see you see the movie ofĭreamgirls (and you will, you know you will). Neither one has a single shred of overtly gay content, and yet each of them has become an iconically gay piece of work. Dreamgirls is weirdly like The Wizard of Oz. ![]()
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