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    Review: What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!” One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years

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    Cole Escola’s dragtastic White House farce asks the immortal question: Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?Like so many before them, members of the “Oh, Mary!” creative team are proudly reclaiming an insulting epithet as a badge of honor.I don’t mean “queer”; they’re way past that. I mean “stupid.”“Oh, Mary!” is “the stupidest play,” Cole Escola, its author and star, tells anyone who will listen.“I have a huge hunger for deep stupidity,” Sam Pinkleton, its director, chimes in.They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.To start with, we don’t get a lot of comedies these days, not the kind you can feel good laughing at. Most contemporary examples of the genre — say “Bootycandy” by Robert O’Hara and “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris — use the form the way doctors use an emetic: They want you to gag on the gags. But the totally unserious “Oh, Mary!” is not medicinal in that sense. It merely wants you to lose your breath guffawing, especially with a series of switchback shocks at the end, so cleverly conceived and executed they’re hilarious.But the premise is already a joke. How else would you describe a back story in which Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola in a hoop skirt the size of a yurt) longs to return to her first love, cabaret, with its “madcap medleys” and built-in excuses for diva behavior?Escola and James Scully in the play, which is on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater after debuting Off Broadway this past winter.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Oh, Mary!,’ a Surprise Downtown Hit, Will Play Broadway This Summer

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      Cole Escola’s madcap comedy about the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln will begin performances in June.“Oh, Mary!,” an outrageously madcap comedy that imagines the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as an oft-inebriated chanteuse-wannabe, will transfer to Broadway this summer after becoming a surprise hit downtown.The show, which is gleefully tasteless and also ahistorical, is the brainchild of Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who built a cult following with a series of YouTube sketches and reached a wider audience with a role on Hulu’s “Difficult People.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews June 26 and to open July 11 at the Lyceum Theater. It is scheduled to run until Sept. 15.“Oh, Mary!” began its life in January at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. That commercial Off Broadway run has been extended twice and is scheduled to end May 12. The run has been sold out, and has attracted a stream of celebrities, including Bowen Yang, Timothée Chalamet, Amy Schumer and Jessica Lange; one night Steven Spielberg, who directed the 2012 film “Lincoln,” showed up with Sally Field (who played Mary Todd Lincoln in the film) and Tony Kushner (who wrote the screenplay).“Oh, Mary!” was written by Escola and is directed by Sam Pinkleton. The Broadway run will feature the same cast as the Off Broadway run, including Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln; it is being produced by Kevin McCollum, Lucas McMahon, Mike Lavoie and Carlee Briglia. More

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      Review: ‘Oh, Mary!’ Turns an Unhinged Bit Into Real Theater

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      Cole Escola’s play, which imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret singer, surprisingly pulls off stretching a stupid joke to its extremes.“For God’s sake, Mary!” Abraham Lincoln says to his wife in “Oh, Mary!,” Cole Escola’s unhinged historical fantasia that imagines its protagonist as an alcoholic cabaret singer married to a gay guy. “How would it look for the first lady of the United States to be flitting around a stage right now in the ruins of war!”“How would it look?!” she responds. “Sensational!”It’s a moment reminiscent of Escola’s early YouTube humor, like in the sketch “Bernadette Peters Does Her Taxes.” An accountant exasperatingly asks for a ballpark figure, and Escola’s Bernadette, wiggling like a charmed snake with their hands on their hips, asks, “Is this a ballpark figure?”So stupid. So campy. So unexpected. And yes, like Mrs. Lincoln, even sensational.There’s little else in New York theater right now quite as surprising as “Oh, Mary!” Written by and starring Escola, it’s a bit taken to an 80-minute extreme that’s silly, nasty, tasteless and, in the end, good theater — the kind of show that will leave you gagging, both in the sense that you’ll be losing your mind with joy, and that you might just be grossed out.Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and “Strangers With Candy.” Mary Todd Lincoln would scowl comfortably alongside the Hollywood starlets of Charles Busch and the manic guests of “At Home With Amy Sedaris.”To this lineage Escola adds a sensibility that’s queer and crass; you often get the impression that their ideas start with a wig in search of a story, inspired by tropes from pop culture — mainly, vintage TV and commercials that begin with “I’m a mom.” Out come characters like Donna Germaine, the sweetly hapless real estate agent of “Pee Pee Manor,” and Fifi, the saloon singer of “Our Home Out West,” a parody of 1970s Christmas specials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’

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      A new Broadway musical tells the disturbing story of Imelda Marcos by putting her, and the audience, in a disco.It’s the applause — including my own — I find troubling.Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. The infernally catchy songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, performed by a tireless and inspired all-Filipino cast, will have you clapping whether you want to or not. Their chunky beats, abetted by insistent dance motivators, may even prompt you to bop at your seat — if you have one.Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. Opened in 1924 as a movie palace, more lately the home of “King Kong” and “West Side Story,” the Broadway has now been substantially gutted, its nearly 1,800 seats reduced to about 800, with standing room for another 300 in the former orchestra section and a 42-inch disco ball dead center.The folks upstairs, if not the mostly younger standees below, will surely recognize the visual reference to Studio 54, the celebrity nightclub where Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, danced away the last decade of her reign while impoverishing her people. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer — is, however, equivocal praise.For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.Is it for Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the beauty queen who rose from “hand-me-downs and scraps” to become the fashion-plate wife of the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos? Is it for the ruthless Ferdinand himself (Jose Llana)? (His landslide election in 1965 elicited some Pavlovian cheers the night I saw the show.) Or is it for Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), the opposition leader who was Imelda’s former beau? (Having spurned her in their youth, he was later assassinated by forces thought to be close to Ferdinand’s regime.) All get equivalent star treatment here.Seating at the Broadway Theater was reduced from 1,800 to about 800, with standing room for another 300, to create a Studio 54-like atmosphere, complete with a 42-inch disco ball in the center of the house.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe confusion of sympathies is just where Byrne and the director Alex Timbers want us. Avoiding the near-hagiography of “Evita” and yet unwilling to bank a commercial production on a totally hateful character, they aim for a middle ground that doesn’t exist, yet mostly hit it anyway. Their Imelda is a victim of poverty and mistreatment, dim despite her cunning and innocent by reason of inanity. When Filipinos fully turn against her during the People Power revolution of 1986, she is more mystified than crushed. “Why don’t you love me?” she sings.We know the answer: The string of her outrages, even apart from her husband’s, seems literally endless. She did not retire from public office until 2019, and her son, Bongbong, is now president.But “Here Lies Love” — the title taken from an epitaph she proposed for herself — tempers the atrocities with the pleasure of its songs. Jacobs, a Broadway Jasmine in “Aladdin,” gets the catchiest ones, and delivers them well, if without the emotional nuance Ruthie Ann Miles brought to the role a decade earlier when the show had a developmental run at the Public Theater.To be fair, the material steers as far from emotion as possible, no matter how many times the word “love” is used. Byrne’s characteristic idiom — which feeds disco, folk and pop through an art rock filter — is too cool for that, and his lyrics, perhaps because they are based on public utterances of the real-life figures, reject psychology almost entirely. They are often thus too banal to serve the usual purpose of songs in musicals; instead of developing character internally they suggest it externally with a torrent of catchphrases. “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” Imelda sings blankly upon assuming power from the sickly Ferdinand.Without a vivid inner life to inflect such clichés, it’s hard to wring anything from them except a cringe. The beamish Ricamora and the scowling Llana, returning from the earlier production, get around the problem with their charisma, and Lea Salonga, in the cameo role of Aquino’s mother, turns “Just Ask the Flowers,” sung at Ninoy’s funeral, into a powerful if perplexing anthem through sheer vocal bravura.Conrad Ricamora, center, as Ninoy Aquino, performing on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while sweeping the audience into new configurations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, a musical not centered on feelings is a strange thing. Where another show might attempt to squeeze the relationship between Imelda and Ninoy for drama, it is merely a lump of undigested fact here. And Imelda’s infamous collection of state-financed shoes goes unmentioned, which is like mounting “Evita” without the Dior dress.To compensate, or double down, Timbers emphasizes pure pageantry in his staging. The actors often perform on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while incidentally sweeping the standees into new configurations. (Guides in pink jumpsuits with airport-style light wands keep them from getting mowed down.) You are left to draw your own conclusions about how crowds, whether in Manila or Manhattan, respond to being pushed around for too long and for apparently arbitrary reasons. There’s a reason affiliations and uprisings are often called movements.No surprise then that the most expressive element in “Here Lies Love” (along with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which also move beautifully) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and large traffic patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the otherwise narrowly focused and sometimes mechanical production achieves.Is it wrong to seek that engagement more fully? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to love too much?”) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Here Lies Love” finesses the question, preferring to be treated as anything — an art object, a dance party — besides what it is. In that way, it recalls Byrne’s Broadway concert “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson also collaborated. But that show, which had no story, needed only to be sleek and enjoyable to score its points.“Here Lies Love” bets that glamour can make up for narrative — or, rather, that in a show about the dangers of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of form follows function into the fire. We are drawn to cultural and political excitement in much the same, often dangerous way.Perhaps the irony of making a musical about that is more viscerally appreciable down on the dance floor. It was for me at the Public, where almost everyone had to stand and be part of the story, not observers of it. (There were only 42 seats.) And perhaps, 10 years later, with our own politics looking a lot more like the Marcoses’, no one can afford to keep a distance.In any case, on Broadway, it’s not until the gorgeous last song, “God Draws Straight,” that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes — the Philippine people — in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.Here Lies LoveAt the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      For Filipino Audiences, ‘Here Lies Love’ Offers Emotional Rip Currents

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      The disco balls were spinning, the club music was pulsing, and on the dance floor, several Filipino audience members were near tears.It was a Saturday night, and at the Broadway Theater, “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne-Fatboy Slim musical about the rise and fall of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the former first couple of the Philippines, was preparing for its Broadway opening on July 20. In previews, it has drawn a growing stream of Filipino American theatergoers, reeled in by the chance to see their national — and in some cases, their family — history told onstage, close enough for them to literally touch.“I’ve never been in a play where I have a personal connection” to the story, said Earl Delfin, a 35-year-old Manhattanite. “I felt represented on a New York stage for the first time.”He got emotional in the opening scenes, he added. “And of course I danced.”Arielle Jacobs as Imelda Marcos, whose journey from beauty pageant contestant to wife of a despot is the focus of the show.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Here Lies Love,” which opened to critical raves and sold-out crowds at the Public Theater downtown in 2013, arrives on Broadway after sojourns in London and Seattle, each time expanding its house and fine tuning its immersive staging. But only now has it added a fully Filipino cast — the first-ever on Broadway, organizers say. Also new are a cadre of Filipino producers, including the Tony winner Lea Salonga, the Pulitzer-winning writer Jose Antonio Vargas, the comedian Jo Koy and the Grammy-winning musician H.E.R., along with investors from Manila.“It only felt responsible, to fully engage with the motherland,” said the costume designer and creative consultant Clint Ramos, a native of Cebu, Philippines, who has worked on the show since its inception. He is now also a producer.“Having cultural capital from the motherland, but also financial capital from the motherland, it feels like the authorship and ownership of the show are holding hands very tightly. And that’s a great feeling,” he said.The narrative framework of the show has not changed: It still harnesses the gloss of a discothèque — as first lady, Imelda was a denizen of Studio 54 — to reflect the Marcoses’ dizzying rise to power, and the glittery allure of privilege and wealth that led the couple to spend their nation into massive debt, to live lavishly as their constituents suffered.The production has a cultural and community liaison who plans Filipino community events; even on regular nights, the show attracts attendees who had direct dealings with the Marcos and Aquino clans, organizers said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesArielle Jacobs, a new addition to the cast, plays Imelda, whose journey from naïve beauty pageant contestant to sentimental megalomaniac — “Why Don’t You Love Me?” goes a signature song — is the focus of the story. Jose Llana reprises Ferdinand from the Public; his path from charismatic leader to presidential despot is shorter. “If they want to boo Marcos,” Llana said of audiences, “then I think I did my job right.”There is no book; the action is driven by Byrne’s soaring tunes (with beats by Fatboy Slim) and by the exuberant choreography of Annie-B Parson, Byrne’s frequent collaborator. A D.J. (Moses Villarama) acts as an emcee.Every day, Ramos said, as the creative team worked out the massive lighting rigs and costume transitions, they also asked the question: “Are we looking at history correctly here?”The challenge — engineered by Byrne, who hoped that the nightlife setting would give audiences a taste of the limitlessness of power — is formidable. “How do you combine joy with tragedy?” said Alex Timbers, the director, in a joint interview with Ramos.In place of a stage, the Broadway Theater was redesigned to create a dance club. Moving platforms carry the performers, with standing theatergoers surrounding them on the floor; catwalks bring the actors within arms reach for those seated above. The choreography encourages audience members to interact with the cast, hip-swiveling beside them in line dances, and playing the part of the faithful at political rallies — moments of civilian joy and swept-along fellowship that are broadcast on giant screens around the space, alongside darker, real news footage and transcripts.Audience members making the Laban sign, a Filipino hand gesture popularized by Ninoy Aquino, Ferdinand Marcos’s chief political rival.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesElizer Caballero, a fan who came from San Francisco, was practically vibrating with delight as he sang and bopped along to the score. The experience of being surrounded by the actors as they told this native story was almost surreal — he felt like part of the show — “but it’s also very poignant,” he said. “Especially for a Filipino American, it’s best to be on the floor. It adds more depth.”An untranslated moment when Imelda curses at Ferdinand in Tagalog has gotten a more consistent laugh on Broadway than it ever did downtown, cast members said. (The production has a cultural and community liaison, Giselle Töngi, who plans Filipino community events; even on regular nights, it attracted attendees who had direct dealings with the Marcos and Aquino clans, organizers said.)Salonga, the first Asian woman to win a Tony (in 1991, for “Miss Saigon”) is stepping in as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s chief political rival, in a guest spot this summer. It is the first time in her long career she has played a role written as Filipina.Seeing a production of “Here Lies Love” a few years ago surfaced visceral memories of her childhood in Manila, during the Marcoses’ reign. Performing in it felt overwhelming. “I’m slamming into history,” Salonga said.Researching the part, she spoke to friends in the Aquino family. (Corazon C. Aquino, Benigno’s widow, succeeded Marcos as president.) In rehearsals for her number, she thought, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to keep my emotions from overtaking me as I try to sing the song?” she said in a phone interview. “I had friends texting me, saying, How on earth are you going to keep from crying when you do this?”Attendees of Filipino descent have described experiencing an intense personal connection at seeing their history depicted onstage.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesFor second-generation Filipino Americans, whose families prioritized assimilation, learning the story of their homeland has been a different kind of revelation. “Growing up, the only thing I really knew about Imelda was her shoe collection,” Jacobs said. “Getting in touch with this part of the Filipino culture, and the resilience of the Filipino people — all of that has been an awakening for me.”“Here Lies Love” is arriving on Broadway in a political and social landscape that’s vastly shifted since its premiere in the Obama era. The rapid unraveling of democracy it depicts is close at hand, the world over, Timbers and Ramos noted. Ferdinand’s habit of exaggerating or outright fabricating his successes is part of the autocrat playbook. Even his recorded dalliances with a starlet have a familiar ring. Ferdinand and Imelda’s son, known as Bongbong, is currently president of the Philippines. (After her husband’s death in 1989, Imelda, now 94, returned to politics and served three terms as a congresswoman.)Developing the project with Byrne, the protean former Talking Head, the creative team took pains not to glamorize Ferdinand, who imposed martial law from 1972 to 1981, and whose regime carried out mass arrests and silenced critics. The assassination of Aquino, at the airport when he returned from exile in the U.S. in 1983, served as a turning point to galvanize opposition against the Marcoses, and is an emotional rip current in “Here Lies Love.”In previews, it has drawn a growing stream of Filipino American theatergoers.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesConrad Ricamora, who has played the boyish Aquino (known as Ninoy) in three of the four productions, understood his legacy quickly. On Broadway, audiences make the Laban sign — a hand gesture like an inverted L; the word means “fight” — that Ninoy popularized. “If you look at people who do heroic things throughout history, they are only able to do them because they are deeply in touch with their humanity and the humanity of others,” Ricamora said.The show has still been criticized for putting a couple known for their ruthless corruption in the spotlight, and for minimizing Imelda’s political prowess. (A website aims to contextualize the country’s history.) In a statement, the producers said their new, binational group came together “in a time of necessary and welcome assessment of who tells what stories,” and that having people with lived experiences of this era further imbued the show “with authenticity.”For the nearly two dozen cast members — eight of whom are making their Broadway debuts — it is a rare chance to commune, and revisit, together, a past that is hardly in the rearview mirror for some of them.Ramos calls himself “a martial law baby,” raised under Marcos’s most brutal period. He was also there in February 1986, a school kid “on top of a tank,” he said, when the four-day protests known as the People Power Revolution swept the couple out of office, peacefully. “I experienced the whole arc of the regime,” he said. He came to the U.S. in the late ’90s, for grad school.Llana’s family landed in New York in 1979, when he was 3; his parents were student activists who had fled martial law. “Me being a part of this show for the past 10 years has really been cathartic,” he said, “because it wasn’t something necessarily that my parents talked about.”The choreography encourages audience members to interact with the cast, hip-swiveling beside them in line dances, and playing the part of the faithful at political rallies.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWhen he first heard about the show, he hoped to play Aquino: “I thought nothing would make my parents prouder.” Instead he was asked to read for Ferdinand. It was, he said, an awkward conversation with his family when he got the part, and he made it known to the creative team that he would walk away if the production flattered a dictator.Still, he said, as an actor he needs to find the humanity in his characters. “And I think maybe that’s where sometimes people start criticizing us, is that we’re humanizing them. But you have to humanize people if you want to hold them accountable.”Llana’s castmates call him “kuya,” which means older brother or older male cousin in Tagalog — a term of endearment. For him, even after so many years with the show, the addition of Filipino producers was deeply meaningful. “It made me feel safe,” he said, “knowing that the Filipinos were in charge, that we could just do our jobs” as artists.Like Salonga, he has played a variety of ethnicities, just about none of them Filipino.“I feel like I owe all of those ethnicities an apology — like, I’m sorry I got cast,” Salonga said. “But things were very different at the time.”Even putting a complex, layered story like this on Broadway — staged like a dance party, no less — could serve as inspiration and empowerment, she hoped. “I want to see other communities of color be able to look at ‘Here Lies Love’ and go, ‘We can do that. We have these stories that we are able to tell. We are going to be able to do this.’” More

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      in Movies

      For Joel Kim Booster, Making ‘Fire Island’ Was a Real Trip

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      The writer and star of “Fire Island” reflects on making the rare romantic comedy that puts gay Asian American men at its center.Joel Kim Booster had a thought: Why do we even need movie trailers? Sure, they give people a bite-size look at a film they might find intriguing, but couldn’t we just … not?This was the theory Booster advanced to me one evening in late April, just hours after the trailer was released for “Fire Island,” a gay romantic comedy he wrote and starred in. Booster had anticipated this moment with a not-inconsiderable level of anxiety, so he met the morning with a plan: After posting the trailer online, he would go back to bed, then keep himself distracted with a trip to the gym and several palliative episodes of “Real Housewives.”A few hours into this plan, as his phone blew up with text messages and Twitter began to pick the trailer apart, he texted the “Fire Island” director Andrew Ahn to announce that he was having either a heart attack or a series of mini-strokes.So consider this his mea culpa: “I’ve done it, too — I’ve made massive judgments about a movie based on two minutes,” said Booster, who is 34, bleached-blond and possessed of a voice so NPR-smooth that a microphone almost seems superfluous. “But now, being on the other side of it, I’m just like, ‘Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing in the world!’”A modern, same-sex gloss on “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, “Fire Island” (streaming on Hulu) stars Booster as our narrator Noah, who makes knowing observations about the titular gay enclave and its social mores. (Think of him as Elizabeth Bennet in a pink Speedo.) Noah didn’t come to Fire Island to look for true love, but as he attends to his insecure friend Howie (Bowen Yang) during their vacation gone wrong, he also takes the measure of a stiff and arrogant suitor who just may be his Mr. Darcy.After Booster was done dodging internet comments and replying to his friends’ texts about the trailer, he met me at Akbar, a storied Los Angeles gay bar with amber lighting, strong cocktails and kitschy, beaded bamboo curtains. (Booster, who moved here from New York a few years ago, picked Akbar because it was one of the few gay bars in town “that didn’t feel like WeHo or a Chipotle.”) We were joined by Ahn, who initially drew Booster’s attention after directing the 2016 indie “Spa Night.” They met years ago and bonded over being gay and Korean in an industry that rarely makes room for their stories.From left, Torian Miller, Bowen Yang, Margaret Cho, Tomás Matos and Booster in “Fire Island.”Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures“We were supposed to split up and do our own things so that we’d take the burden off each other,” Booster said as Ahn chuckled into his tequila soda. “But then we decided to do one project together that now has the same problem of having to represent everybody.”Though there have recently been more gay rom-coms from big studios than ever before, that’s not exactly saying much: They still come around as rarely as comets, and none of the other ones — not “Love Simon,” “Happiest Season,” or this year’s forthcoming Billy Eichner vehicle “Bros” — have a leading cast that is comprised mainly of Asian American actors. So there’s an extra layer of scrutiny that Booster expects from people who’ve never seen themselves in a film protagonist before.And he totally gets that, but it’s all superseded by the fact that he’s the protagonist in question, and he can never be all things to all people because his own story is so specific. Booster was adopted as an infant and home-schooled by white parents in Plainfield, Ill., before he came out as a teenager, studied musical theater in college and moved to New York to become a stand-up comedian. Even now, his conservative family is barely aware that their son is making gay rom-coms that the entire internet is determined to weigh in on.So you’ll have to excuse Booster if he can’t take on everybody else’s concerns right now — not when he’s still got plenty of his own to grapple with.“The night before we started shooting, I was like, ‘This is either going to change my life or it’s going to be the biggest flop of my career,’” Booster told me. “And I don’t think there will be anything in between that.”THE FIRST TIME that Booster and Yang went to Fire Island, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. In those days, both men were still clinging to their day jobs (Booster was the project manager for an internet sock company), and to make the trip economically feasible, they fit 11 impoverished friends into a house with three bedrooms. They knew that the island had a reputation as a haven for rich, white gay men with muscles, but it still unnerved Booster when someone would fix him with a hard stare that all but declared, “You don’t belong here.”Still, the more time he spent with his friends on Fire Island, the freer he felt. “You don’t realize the weight you carry every day by just walking around in straight spaces,” he said. And even the peculiar prejudices of the island became grist for the mill once Booster read Austen’s novel and realized that her story of social stratification would map neatly onto his own experiences.Over the next few years, while Booster’s star began to rise as a stand-up comedian, he kept going back to Fire Island and plugging away at a script about the place that would star him and Yang. And in early 2020, Booster’s breakthrough finally arrived when the project was greenlit … by Quibi.Booster with the director of “Fire Island,” Andrew Ahn, at Akbar.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDon’t laugh. Yes, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form streaming app has since become one of Hollywood’s most infamous flameouts, but at the time, Booster was all-in. Every other studio had passed on “Fire Island,” and Booster’s other big break — a supporting role on NBC’s 2019 sitcom “Sunnyside” — had capsized, leaving his career in a precarious place: “People were like, ‘It’s going to be huge, it’s the next “Office,” you’re going to be able to buy a house with the residuals once it gets to five seasons.’ And then we were canceled after three episodes.”Quibi didn’t last much longer. The app launched one month into the pandemic, tumbled out of the most-downloaded charts within a week, and was sold for parts to Roku by the fall. “Going into lockdown, everyone was depressed, but I felt like my career was kaput,” said Booster. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is done. By the time this is all over, people will have forgotten about me completely.’”Luckily, Searchlight Pictures began to sniff around the project, provided that Booster could rewrite it as a feature film. And that’s when Ahn got into the ring.“I don’t think I’m patting myself on the back by saying, yeah, I think I’m the only person that could have directed this,” Ahn told me. For the last decade, he has lived in what he calls “a gay Asian flophouse in Echo Park” — a building with cheap rent, no central air, plenty of party-throwing camaraderie and an invader opossum that took an entire month to capture. Ahn felt so well-suited for “Fire Island” that he could have been a character from it; in fact, for the movie’s mood board, he used images of himself and his friends.Ahn was thrilled as the movie became even more Asian during the casting process: When a male actor dropped out, the comedian Margaret Cho came aboard as the characters’ destitute den mother, and Booster’s love interest, originally written for a non-Asian person of color, went to the Filipino American actor Conrad Ricamora. (“In the chemistry read, Conrad flustered Joel, and I loved seeing that,” Ahn said.) Though Booster happily signed off on both castings, he still had some reservations.“It became suddenly not only a gay movie, but an Asian gay movie,” Booster said as we finished our drinks and set out for another bar. “It felt heavier, the responsibility of it.”Still, he knows these sorts of opportunities are few and far between. Booster was crestfallen when he didn’t land the key role of Michelle Yeoh’s gay child in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which ultimately went to the actress Stephanie Hsu: “I went in for it and there was just me and a million girls, and I was like, ‘What is going on?’” he said.Sometimes, Booster even feels like he has to justify being cast in his own movie. As we arrived at the Eagle — a leather bar boasting pinball machines, a pool table covered in red felt and TV sets playing vintage porn — Booster talked about the internet commenters who pronounced him too gym-fit to be plausible as a Fire Island outsider. “I think people are really naïve about how awful gay men can be sometimes,” he said, nursing a beer.“I think there’s a lot of nuance in the fact that, yes, I experience gay racism, but I also look like this,” Booster continued. “I’m aware that I’ve done a lot of work to try and make myself visible in those spaces, and I’ve taken a very conventional way of trying to do that. But also, I had to feel good about myself before I started to do all of this — it wasn’t reverse engineered. The first time I sold a script, I was like, ‘Oh, I have so much more value than just if some rando thinks I’m sexually viable or not.’”And ultimately, you can’t control what those randos think of you, whether they’re anonymous internet commenters or strangers who pass judgment in person. Ahn recounted a story of shooting the movie on the Fire Island boardwalk when two gay men walked by and noticed Booster standing there. “Oh, that’s the lead of the movie,” one said.“Him?” said his friend.Booster, right, with Conrad Ricamora in “Fire Island.”Jeong Park/Searchlight PicturesAhn was indignant, but as he told the story, Booster just nodded. “As a comedian, with everything I’ve done up to this point, I’m just supposed to be funny, you know?” Booster said. “But with this, I’m supposed to be a romantic lead, and it’s a lot for me in my life to be confronted with that and be like, ‘Am I that guy? Is this believable?’”Booster had never been in a relationship before he started writing “Fire Island,” and everything he knew about love, he had learned from watching Nora Ephron movies. But as “Fire Island” headed into production, Booster met the video-game producer John-Michael Kelly, and something in him softened.“I’ve just never met somebody that has made me want to not be alone until I met him,” Booster said.He began to rewrite the scenes he shared with Ricamora, pulling from actual conversations he’d had with Kelly. And the film’s final beat between the characters, which initially culminated in a flippant joke, was tweaked to land on something sweeter and more romantic. “It was like I was doing drag when I first wrote the movie about love,” Booster said, “and then after experiencing it and doing the rewrites, it felt much more real and lived in.”The movie has been earning stellar reviews, which has Booster breathing a sigh of relief: “When I was making it,” he said, “I thought, ‘If this movie is bad, I can never show my face here again. I just ruined my favorite place in the world.’” And yes, he and Yang both plan to go back to the island this summer.“Do you think it’s going to be different?” Ahn asked. “Do you think it’s going to be weird?”“It’s going to be extremely weird,” Booster said. “I’ll either be persona non grata or the mayor.”And what will it feel like when Booster goes from “He’s the lead of ‘Fire Island’?” to “He’s the lead of ‘Fire Island’!”Booster just shrugged: He’ll know when he knows. “I don’t think it’s hit me quite yet,” he said. “I’m not getting Grindr messages about it.” More

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      Conrad Ricamora on His Bumpy Road to ‘Little Shop of Horrors’

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      The actor reflects on continuing the Off Broadway revival’s hot streak, and fighting against the stereotypes facing Asian American actors.Since it opened in October 2019, Michael Mayer’s well-received “Little Shop of Horrors” revival has drawn quite the handsome string of leading men: Jonathan Groff was the first to step into Seymour Krelborn’s Converse sneakers, and he was followed by Gideon Glick and Jeremy Jordan. This reflects the casting evolution of the character, a painfully shy plant geek. Not many roles have been played by both Rick Moranis (in the show’s 1986 movie adaptation) and Jake Gyllenhaal (in a 2015 concert production).When asked about joining this, ahem, hot streak, Conrad Ricamora burst out laughing. “I played a nerdy IT guy for six years on ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ so I don’t know if there’s a full consensus that I’m in the Jake Gyllenhaal Hall of Fame of Hot Actors,” he said.Since Jan. 11, Ricamora, 42, has been taking center stage at the Westside Theater, and while he displays serious comic muscle, he also taps into the character’s painful loneliness. When he sings “Someone show me a way to get outta here / ’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here” in the opening number, the ache is palpable.This versatility won’t be news to those who have seen him onstage before — yes, Oliver stans, he can sing! There was the way Ricamora would summon a shamanic intensity as the magnetic political leader Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim hit show that opened at the Public Theater in 2013. And then there was his ardent romanticism as the doomed Burmese scholar and lover Lun Tha in the 2015 Lincoln Center production of “The King and I” — oh, those duets with Ashley Park’s Tuptim!Chatting after a recent rehearsal, the actor was candid about the obstacles he had to overcome on the road to Skid Row, the derelict neighborhood where “Little Shop of Horrors” is set.Ricamora as Seymour, with his seemingly innocent plant, in the Off Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors.”Emilio MadridThere was, for example, the time the director of his first professional show, a production of “Anything Goes” in North Carolina, asked if he could sound more Chinese. “We call it ‘ching chong’ in the Asian acting community — ‘they want you to be ching-chong-y’ ” said Ricamora, who is half-Filipino. “It didn’t feel great.”Even with the production of “The King and I,” which had great resources, he talked about being frustrated by what he felt was a lack of attention to dialects. “I didn’t want to make any waves because I wanted this job — I still had debt, so much debt,” he said. “And No. 2, I thought the best way to work was to say yes to everything because then they would tell other people that you’re easy to work with.” (The financial pressure was assuaged only after he started making “TV money,” as he put it, on the show “How to Get Away with Murder,” in which he played the computer whiz Oliver Hampton for six years.)It was a relief for Ricamora to be cast in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s “Soft Power,” a deliciously acid meta-musical from 2019 that looked at mythmaking and the way American culture deals with ethnic clichés — including a whole Rodgers and Hammerstein pastiche number about correct Chinese pronunciation.“He’s kind of a charisma machine,” the playwright David Henry Hwang said of Ricamora, who starred in Hwang’s “Soft Power.”Cole Wilson for The New York TimesOne day, Tesori asked the largely Asian American cast what it had cost them to tell such a personal, emotional story in the show. Reliving that moment, Ricamora turned her question on its head, and was once again overcome with the pain and anger the question had unlocked as he thought about the cast getting the still-rare opportunity to play fully human characters after so many years of stereotypical roles.“What does it [expletive] cost me, us all of my Asian American brothers and sisters?” he recounted, his voice shaking. “Here’s what it costs us: Women are constantly made to play prostitutes and just sexual beings. As Asian American men, we’re constantly asked to get rid of our sexuality completely and to be the butt of the joke and to be treated as third-class citizens.“When you see Asian Americans standing up onstage in the theater, they’re overcoming so many years of people telling them to push that aside and be a stereotype,” he continued, tearing up. “We all wonder, ‘When are we going to get a chance to exist fully?’ And ‘Soft Power’ felt like that for all of us.”It had been a long ride up to that moment — yet for quite a while, Ricamora’s life was focused not on theater but on tennis.“You don’t know how many times I wrote over and over again ‘I’m going to win the U.S. Open’ in my journal in college,” he said, laughing. “Wanting to get to Broadway was never a goal of mine because I didn’t know it existed. I grew up on Air Force bases in very toxic masculine culture, so there was no theater. There were no arts at all.”His military dad, who had emigrated from the Philippines, moved the family around until settling for a longer spell in Florida, where young Conrad attended middle and high school. His mother, who is white, had left when he was an infant, and his father remarried when Conrad was 8.He majored in psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, N.C., which he attended on a tennis scholarship. And then he had an epiphany: In his junior year he took a theater class and was assigned a monologue from Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky,” about a teenage boy attempting to connect with his estranged father. “I remember thinking, ‘This is my experience — I just have to stand here and say these words because I know what this person is talking about,’” he said. “The electricity I felt in that moment, that connection between actor, playwright and audience is something I’ve been chasing ever since.”Ricamora as the Filipino politician Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRicamora with Francis Jue in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s  musical “Soft Power.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter completing his degree, he started acting in local community theater and moved on to professional productions. Low point: that “Anything Goes.”High point: “Shakespeare’s R & J,” in which he played Juliet opposite Evan Jonigkeit’s Romeo in 2008. “For a queer person, it blew my mind away,” Ricamora said of the Philadelphia production. “It felt like it exploded the world open for me. There was so much more that I could be accessing in my work.”He was almost done with his graduate studies in acting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when he saw the casting call for “Here Lies Love” and traveled to New York to audition.“Immediately you just could tell you’re in the presence of someone really special and — I hate to use this word — starry,” the director Alex Timbers said over the phone. “There was a real connection with the role, but also something where you want to be a part of that actor’s career early on because they’re going to go to extraordinary places.”Hwang was similarly impressed: “He’s kind of a charisma machine.”And still, the outpouring unleashed by Tesori’s question is haunting. Yes, Ricamora is succeeding three Tony-nominated actors in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but it’s also hard to not feel a little frustrated for him: Why did it take so long to land a starring role? Why aren’t actors like Ricamora, Jason Tam (“Be More Chill”) or Telly Leung (“Allegiance”) better known?“There haven’t been those roles for Asian romantic leads, that more or less hasn’t existed,” Hwang said. “Even when you get a role like Lun Tha, which is sort of in that direction, it’s still not the center.”He added: “It’s hard for Asian women in a different way: They tend to be over-sexualized, portrayed as either lotus blossoms or dragon ladies, as we like to put it. So they are limited as well but in a different set of stereotypes.”Tom in “The Glass Menagerie” is one of the characters Ricamora said he’d like to play. Cole Wilson for The New York TimesNever mind the quality: even the quantity is lacking. According to a report by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, only 6.3 percent of all available roles in New York City went to Asian American actors during the 2018-19 season.A partial solution is exactly what Ricamora is doing now: putting his stamp on an iconic role such as Seymour. He allowed that he was “white-knuckling it a little” after being propelled onstage following just two weeks of rehearsal, so for now he is focusing on making the role his — “I’ll fill it out more and more as the run goes on,” he said.For Tammy Blanchard, who has played Seymour’s love interest, Audrey, from the start: “Conrad is very deep, very centered. Jeremy was very comedic, but you also had this sense of feeling for him. I think that Conrad’s going to be more what Michael Mayer originally intended with Jonathan Groff — a dark, kind of emotional journey.”And when that experience concludes, Ricamora is ready to tell more stories.“I’d like to play Tom in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ or Hal in ‘Henry IV, Part One’ — my daddy issues run deep,” Ricamora said, with a laugh, of his dream parts. “But especially after doing ‘Soft Power,’ I think the roles are still being written by playwrights I haven’t even met, by Asian American playwrights that I haven’t even met.”The challenge is obvious for that last demographic: The coalition’s report points out that Asian American playwrights, composers, librettists and lyricists made up only 4.4 percent of all writers produced on New York stages in 2018-19. When a promising slate of Asian American-steered productions was lined up, at long last, in 2020, Covid-19 hit.Ricamora is willing to do his part there, too, though in television for now: He and his friends Kelvin Moon Loh and Jeigh Madjus just sold “No Rice,” a half-hour comedy series that they are writing, executive producing and starring in. “The title comes from what people on Grindr or Tinder or Match or whatever would put,” he explained, referring to racist shorthand descriptions. “Around 2015-2016 and earlier, it was all over the dating apps — people would freely write ‘no rice,’ ‘no spice,’ ‘no fats,’ ‘no fems.’” (He would not reveal yet where it will air.)In the meantime, he is happy to be back onstage, battling a bloodthirsty plant and singing of loneliness and ache. “I love coming back to theater so much because you get to show up every day,” Ricamora said. “Theater grounds you — eight shows a week is no joke.” More