The Show on the Roof: A New Musical

Or: “The Show of My Dreams”

Everyone has a song in their heart, some people have a musical. A driving need to create a life to create a world that is brighter and glitzier from the everyday, where every thought comes forth in rhyme, a place to express the life that has been hidden from you or, at times, actively repressed. So has been the lot of Al Travelstead (Tom Ford), Boise impresario and restauranteur. In life he ran the show on the roof of the Howdy Pardner Drive In, a local institution of song, dance and good clean family fun in the 1950’s.

Tonight, Al has dropped down from the Great Beyond to cash in his one Divinely granted wish: to bring his show to life as he wanted it; gaudy, bawdy, and free for himself and his friends to express themselves fully. To this end he has conjured his old staff: Rita (Jillian Kates) Judy (Tess McKenna), John (Lucas Dixon) and Wayne (Mack Shrilla) along with the mild mannered but ferociously talented pianist Jimmy Sales (Alex Syiek) and accompaniment (Louis McFarland on Drums and Nicolas McClain on Bass).

There is one problem. Al’s show has come with a meddling co-producer; Him (voiced by Gus Curry), a divinity not so much judgmental and wrathful as high-strung and pissy (you can see why Lucifer beat tracks if this is what he had to work with.) This Shouty God directs Al to tell us the story of what happened in Boise in the fall of ’55, a horrific witch hunt of gay men that ruined hundreds of lives and turned the City of Trees into a city of nightmares.

As Al has long awaited his show to come to light, so too has The Show on the Roof been long awaited in the minds of Ford and Syiek (It’s playwright and composer/lyricist respectively). For well over three years the musical has gathered in the shadow of a global pandemic and is finally ready to shine, and boy it does not disappoint. With shades of ‘Tony Kushner meets Cabaret’ Syiek and Ford offer us a gay (and gay!) fantasia, a kaldysclpic experience and joyful musical focused around a horrible event.

And there’s not much else I can reveal, dear reader. The Show on the Roof is packed full of surprises and while theatrically they stand on their own as glowing scenes, taking them outside the threshold or revelation would dim their sparkle. Going through the show is like unwrapping a mummy (both ghastly and awesome, in the traditional sense) with each layer of story bandage revealing a brightly worked gem or an ingeniously poisonous spike that launches itself at your face.

With more than forty characters there is a lot of story that glides past an audience. Fortunately the cast of worthies (under the elegantly sketched direction of Rory Pelsue and Amy O’Brien’s choreography) more than make up the cast. Of special note (with laurels and blooms thrown to Ford as playwright, the dialog is so crisp and honest) are the scenes that replay and refract, beginning with PSA style assignation that thaws into something less sinister and more sad, and later with the meeting of Theatrical legend Mel Dern (Ford) with a young lover turned accuser (Shrilla, putting his elastic range, physical and vocal, to expert use) in a small musical within a musical.

Other parts of note include Shirley (McKenna) an overworked secretary at the Police Office who’s complacency is shattered and whose spirit is hardened against the reign of special inspector and “homo hunter” Fairchild (Ford again) a chilly monotone mass of cold and stony hatred given to sudden rages that had the audience jumping in our seats.

And there is the prim Edward (Dixon) clerk of the Men’s Department at the Mode, who keeps perfect poise and creates a space of tidiness around him. Dixon (plus a shining tertiary role as a sex starved prisoner) has Edward leap from brilliancy to brilliancy from a moment with his mother (Ford, once more), Fairchild (in a brilliantly chilling interrogation driving home the banality and apathy of the homophobic forces), and the ongoing relationship with Louisa Davis (Kates, who also serves as several secondary Law Enforcement officers of great comedic effect), a long time customer of his dealing with a heartbreak and discovery of her own, which culminates in his anguished “Normal” the show’s most reverberant and shining song.

Syiek’s numbers are bright and spunky, most very reminiscent of the period, with infectious, lifting tunes and bold, elbowing lyrics. While the whole score glitters (the opening number and its reprises perfectly unpack the divine moment, and the Great Work ahead,) he trots out the big hitters though for the end: bittersweet Normal and its bitterer reprise most notable, as well as a simple shining finale, and my favorite, the split-lipped-grinning shout-to-the-heavens Spirit Picker-Upper “I’m Gonna Be Fine” wherein the cast makes a human chain to rescue one of their own (a brilliantly simple embodiment of the queer community that was destroyed or was never allowed to grow the first place and would have done so much for so many. That made me cry. It’s the little things.)

The Show On the Roof is a balancing act. It is delightful and its horrific, it’s toe tapping and its blood chilling. It shines a light on the willfully forgotten crimes of yesteryear while conjuring closer undefined shadows of today. For homophobia is still alive and well in our city and our country, and continues to strike and strike and strike in dark alleys and the courts of law.

Ford’s Al, indomitable Travelstead, (ever ready to fight God, or become him! ) holds us in the palm of his hand. He has come to make his dreams come true yet finds as the events of 55 unfold, with all their ugly intolerance, their fear and betrayal, that he might be constructing his own hell. He’s warm, wry, and gracious but when things get down you can feel the bleeding edges of him cutting at your own heart, devoid of artifice but magnetic in its pull. His motivations are titanic but simple, he had a show in his heart, and he wants his last chance, the chance he could never take, to set it free.