STREAMING CINEMA
Desire Forbidden to Be Spoken
Marco Berger unspools a bromance blown up with unchecked passions
Alfonso Barón and Gaston Re in Marco Berger’s “The Blonde One,” now available on streaming and DVD.
PODCAST
Waiting for The Show
A full-length musical in podcast form richly deserves a listen
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
COVID-19 continues to
decimate the performing
arts. Since the theaters
closed in New York on
March 12, show business throughout
the city has been AWOL.
The new productions of “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and
“Hangmen” have announced that
they will not open after a handful
of previews. All advances for other
shows through at least April 13
have been refunded, bringing economic
hardship to any show that
was operating on a slim margin.
Even if theaters are able to open
in mid-April, it’s anyone’s guess if
audiences will be willing to spend
several hours in close quarters
with strangers, and tourism, a major
driver of Broadway ticket sales,
is likely to be way off for the foreseeable
future.
Actors, however, are always a resourceful
lot, working around any
adversity. From the illegal underground
theaters of London from
between 1648 and 1660 — after
the Puritans shut down the mainstream
houses — to the legions
of performers fl ocking to YouTube
while the coronavirus rages, the
arts will out, and even in isolation
the human imperative of expression
and the demand for narrative
is unabated.
With a quick online search, one
can fi nd many streaming performances
from the Metropolitan Opera
to Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.
Then there’s the subscription
streaming service, BroadwayHD,
which offers a free seven-day trial.
I’ve sampled a bunch of these,
and while some are quite enjoyable
there’s a fundamental disconnect
TLA RELEASING
between the experience of live performance
and watching a fi lmed
live performance.
Still, any port in a storm, right?
Thanks to the podcast phenomenon,
audio entertainment has
undergone a resurgence in recent
years, so much so that companies
like Audible are investing signifi -
cantly in performance for audio.
All this activity, of course, recalls
the heyday of audio entertainment
— radio’s golden age, when a
broadcast like Orson Welles’ “The
War of the Worlds” in 1938 could
throw the nation into a panic.
Now, we’ve got the fi rst modern
full-length musical made exclusively
for audio. “Monotony: The
Musical” features a book and lyrics
by Sarah Luery and music by
Jared Chance Taylor.
Divided into seven parts, it tells
the story of a young accountant,
BY GARY M. KRAMER
Since everyone has a bit of
time on their hands these
days, now is a perfect opportunity
to watch one
of out gay Argentine writer/ director
Marco Berger’s fi lms. Berger’s
distinctive brand of “slow” cinema
relies mainly on inaction; most of
the drama stems from the characters’
long, meaningful glances
that brim with unspoken desire.
The fi lmmaker’s work often presents
the relationship between two
men caught in an intimate — and
sexual — dynamic.
“The Blonde One,” his most recent
release in the States, available
on DVD and via streaming
platforms, is a poignant, erotic,
and quietly powerful drama in this
vein.
➤ FORBIDDEN SPEECH, continued on p.29
Herbert Handler III, who is miserable
in his job, but always careful.
When a romance begins to blossom
between Herbert and his boss’
son Theo, a would-be comic book
writer, complications, as they say,
ensue.
The plotting is classic musical
comedy. Boy meets boy, things
threaten to pull them apart, but
they fi nd each other in the end.
The cast includes a company of
secondary characters, especially
the feisty girl Marnee who puts
Theo and Herbert together, and
Herbert’s boss who is also Theo’s
father. There’s also the ghost of
Herbert’s father and, for some reason,
a talking bear.
This is conventional, cockamamie
musical comedy, and it’s
delightfully entertaining. Taylor’s
➤ MONOTONY: THE MUSICAL, continued on p.27
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