THEATRE: Shaun de Waal
PERHAPS one of the good things about the reshuffling of the arts councils will be that each province gets to see more of the others’ work — such as the two Capab productions directed by Marthinus Basson now showing in Johannesburg. (And let’s hope that one day he restages his much-lauded Cabaret, too.)
At the Market Theatre is Boy Meets Boy, a musical comedy about two men falling in love. Right at the start, its shape is outlined in song: ”boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy in the end”. A musical of this sort has to have a happy ending, and more often than not that means marriage.
The play opens in London. The time is 1936: King Edward VII has just abdicated to marry the woman he loves, American divorcee Wallis Simpson. (”Giving it all up for love” is one of the chief motifs.) This 1936, however, is one in which men may marry men, a premise no more preposterous than that of most musicals.
It is a delicious inversion that supplies much of the play’s humour as well as its raison d’tre — and a comment on the genre, so beloved of many gay men, that usually turns on heterosexual romance.
The penurious English nobleman Guy Rose (Ian Duncan) is about to marry American millionaire Clarence Cutler (Blaise Koch) in a high- society wedding. Across town, American journalist Casey O’Brien (Brian Heydenrych) is partying up a storm. Soon he will conceive a passion for ”the English Rose”, and from there many a delightfully ludicrous complication will follow — muddled identity, misunderstanding and so on — en route to the boy getting the other boy in the end.
This is all extremely amusing, and quite poignant in places, despite the self-conscious style and the element of send-up. The songs are not all pastiche — numbers such as Let’s Not Say Let’s Not and Does Somebody Love You? are touching in their own right. It is all staged with panache, a series of screens providing a malleable space for the action, and the neatly choreographed cast doubles up in roles so that Boy Meets Boy seems to have a larger ensemble than it does.
Duncan is indisputably the star of the show, as appealing, if not more so, in his dowdy incarnation as he is in his later, more glamorously made-over mode. He has a beautiful voice and a confident command of the stage. Yet Koch, as the wickedly manipulative Clarence, all but steals the show with an hilariously over-the-top performance. He even wins our sympathy: this is a musical with such a gaily sweet perception of life that even the villain turns out to have a heart of gilt.
Heydenrych is slightly less impressive, his American accent broad enough to mark him instantly as a South African, and his face tends to assume a wide-eyed, grinning rictus when he sings. Nonetheless, he is charming as the swaggering newshound, and one soon forgets such small infelicities.
Paul Harris, as Casey’s straight friend Andrew, somewhat lacks projection, but he manages to establish a pleasing presence. As a whole, the cast never misses a step, and the live musical accompaniment is perfect.
Boy Meets Boy is longer than might be
expected, but the time dances by on light feet. By the end, one has been cheered and touched — this has to be the most plainly enjoyable piece of theatre on Johannesburg’s stages at the moment.
Boy Meets Boy runs at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, until April 27