SYNOPSIS: Mad about the Boy! is based on a series of gay-themed novelty albums put out by the little-known California-based Camp Records in the 1960s and sold through ads in the back of beefcake magazines of the time. These recordings have since slipped into the public domain, and it is the original recordings that will be used during the performance. The story tells of a milquetoast, deeply closeted gay man in the early Sixties, his unexpectedly exciting life as a door-to-door salesman accidentally exposed to the sexual perversity of his era, and his unrequited crush on an office boy.

HISTORY: Mad About the Boy! was produced November 24-December 17 at Omaha's Blue Barn Theatre. It was directed by Hughston Walkinshaw and starred Brandom Higdem, Jill Anderson, and Nils Haaland.

REVIEWS: "A hilarious and biting sendup of the time before the gay rights movement." -- Omaha World-Herald

"Delightful ... laugh-out-loud ... There’s plenty to love about 'Mad About the Boy!'" -- Omaha City Weekly

NOTES: I promised myself I wasn't going to write any more gay-themed plays for a while, and, in fact, am midway through two plays that fulfill exactly that promise. But then I stumbled upon the Queer Music Heritage site and their collection of MP3 recordings taken from several LPs and 45-inch singles released by Camp Records in the early Sixties, and I guess I just couldn't help myself.

The original recordings are hilarious, campy sendups of easy listening and folk music, with titles such as "Homer the Happy Little Homo" and "Stanley the Many Transvestite," and I got it into my head to create a musical based on these songs, in which the actors simply lip-sync to the original recordings. I approached Hughston Walkinshaw of Omaha's Blue Barn Theatre with the songs and the crassly commercial idea to create a Christmas play out of it, inspired by the incomprehensible success of dreck like Christmas with the Crawfords, which must be one of the laziest assemblages I've ever witnessed, consisting primarily of dialogue culled from Mommy Dearest. Walkinshaw was interested in my play idea, and so I set to writing.

I wrote the play in a rush, scripting all of it in three days while playing Something Weird's sampler DVD behind me. I had decided to set the musical at the time the Camp records were released -- about 1964 -- and base it on exploitation films of the era, and the Something Weird DVD, which includes scenes and trailers from trash spectacles such as Doris Wishman's Another Day, Another Man and the inexplicable juvenile gang film Just For the Hell of It, seemed perfect to set the mood.

In truth, my primary inspiration was Russ Meyer's 1959 film The Immoral Mr. Teas, in which a door-to-door salesman is constantly confronted by the spectacle of female toplessness. The film is considered to be the first "nudie cutie," and is sort of the forerunner of modern pornography, in that, unlike the childbirth, VD, and nudist films that preceded it, Mr. Tease made no attempt to be education. It's only purpose was the spectacle of female pulchritude.

I set out to write a gay version of Mr. Teas, replacing Meyer's topless females with the gay male equivalent of the era: Semi-naked beefcake, and plenty of it. I must say, though, that the once threatening underworld of gay male sexuality seems to have dimmed with time -- beefcake pictures were the primary published erotic spectacle for gay men of the Sixties. However, they seems so innocent now that Mad About the Boy seems about as threatening to me as a Doris Day film, which, with its flawed romance and frequent popular jazz msuical interludes, it sort of resembles. But what the hell. I like Doris Day films as well.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA: The music for Mad About the Boy can be downloaded in MP3 format from Queer Music Heritage, here.

DOWNLOAD Mad About the Boy here.

To read the script, you will need a copy of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Download it here.