Written and Directed by Sky Gilbert
The Cabaret Company Presentation
at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre
April 16-27, 2008

    At a running time of around 80 minutes (and no intermission), Happy is a very little gay exercise with sparse music, or, as the 30-something fag-hag in the show puts it, it’s “an intimate musical about people leading lives of quiet desperation and just singing at times.” It’s not a little gay musical; it’s just little—which is to say that size can matter even in the theatre. Sky Gilbert is, of course, nothing if not brave, even when he allows his urge to skewer what he dislikes to overrule his head. He’s skeptical, at the very least, of same-sex marriage, and as a proponent of open relationships, he uses satire to expose the hypocrisy of gays who pretend to be in committed relationships while seeking ways to cheat on the side. His central characters are a young gay couple (Bob and Dave) who are collaborating on a new musical, and their hard-drinking fag-hag friend Sue, who’s given up on the prospect of marriage for herself. She’s in a difficult position because she serves as dramaturge but is afraid to be totally honest about the musical because Bob (the lyricist) will disapprove of her. Bob, who used to be a suicidal alcoholic who also indulged in drugs and unsafe sex, has changed. Marriage appears to have domesticated him. He’s become celibate, though in his tipsy state, he mixes up the word with “abstinent” and “obstinate.” He’s so far swung to the right that he’s even turned against camp, though (as played by David Tomlinson) he’s a swish himself, or maybe it’s just the cocktails overacting on him. He can’t even write a good lyric anymore, even though he protests that his musical is not a piece of Brad Fraser garbage!

   None of his four musical numbers is especially memorable, though Sharron Matthews (who gives the most truthful, insightful performance in the small cast) makes something palpably effective of her “Faghag’s Lament.” Bob’s problems aren’t just with lyrics. He’s an inveterate liar—a point dramatized by the sudden appearance of a young leather-and-metal-bound webcam hustler named Tom, who claims to be working for The Evening Star, but who turns out to be a singing, dancing symbol of AIDS. Jamieson Eakin, who plays him, lacks the voice to score in his flamboyant number (“The AIDS Song”), so his arrival doesn’t really lift the show. In any case, he’s not meant to be taken as more than a meta-theatrical device, for it is quickly revealed that what we have been watching has been a scene from a musical in the act of being written. So, Happy deconstructs itself with ever diminishing results.

   The scene of Tom’s arrival is then repeated—this time as it occurred in real life—but to no avail. Instead of being a musical virus, Tom is simply a victim. His teeth are rotting from his crystal meth habit, and his father is dying of cancer. He claims he was promised a role in Bob’s musical—which is probably true as Bob has the “hots” for him—whenever Dave (the composer) is not around. And Dave, very conveniently, isn’t around much, which doesn’t do much for Jason Cadieux’s acting that seems to be forced to emerge from under an unprepossessing toque much of the time. Dave catches his spouse in a compromising position, so he and Bob decide to scrap the old musical (good thinking!) and write a new one, instead, with no music, no AIDS number, and no fag-hag song. Everything is forced to a clichéd close with the silhouette of a heart on the back wall, minus the Follies poster and the Xtra cover of a happy Bob and Dave. If this ending is a sign of the new Sky Gilbert, give me the older one who didn’t bother with unnecessary ejaculations from the charm factory. But Gilbert, who has defined gay theatre in Toronto for decades, can be excused this failure. He is certain to re-bound.

photo (L-R): Jason Cadieux and David Tomlinson


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