Less Than Perfect
At the press conference where it was announced that Toronto’s new slogan to spur tourism would be “Toronto Unlimited,” a video showed some cute icons: a fork twirling spaghetti to represent the city’s great restaurants, quarter notes bouncing all over the place to signify Toronto’s eclectic music scene, and so on. As soon as the video ended, Mayor David Miller took questions from the assembled. He was asked by one reporter, “Why isn’t there an icon to represent the gay scene in town or our liberal laws on gay marriage?” Miller didn’t look the slightest bit uncomfortable and said that this was a good idea.
Granted, I was here during Pride Week, and I’m sure that many of the rainbow flags I saw were put up only for that seven-day celebration. But I’m hoping that the many gay and lesbian couples I saw holding hands or caressing each other while walking down the street were just doing what they do every week of the year. Maybe I saw more gay couples than usual because I was on my way to a new gay musical, Perfect Life. It’s at the Poor Alex, a theater whose name is an obvious play on the Royal Alex(andra) Theatre — the still-operating, handsome Toronto house that a rich, stagestruck Canadian kid built in 1907 for $700,000 and that the Mirvishes got for a song ($250,000) many decades later. The Poor Alex has been around for a while, too, as is witnessed by the yellowing handbills for such shows as Arsenic and Old Lace and Goodbye, Charlie that are plastered on the walls of the men’s room.
I’m skeptical that Perfect Life posters will ever be plastered with pride on the wall. The book, music, and lyrics were written by one Jet Matas, who also stars in the show. Seems that Matas has the Peter Allen/Legs Diamond syndrome: Allen wasn’t content to just star in Legs Diamond, he had to write the music and lyrics as well to show people how multi-talented he was. But he wasn’t. Matas has even more hubris in taking on the libretto, too. Like Allen, if he had just been content to write the music, he would have done well; the melodies of many of the songs in Legs Diamond and Perfect Life pass muster. Matas has also done some good work (and bad) on the book but, as a lyricist, he tries to rhyme “cheap date” with “prostate,” “homophobic” with “catastrophic,” “opportunity” with “buggery,” and “cliff” with “shit.” In one line, he manages to include not only a false accent but also a terrible banality: “This is how we’re meant to be / One big happy family.”
Chris (played by Matas, of course) and Sarah are roommates, each of whom is looking for a boyfriend. But, at the moment, Sarah is more concerned with cleaning the apartment to entertain Claire, her best childhood friend, and Claire’s fiancé, whom she hasn’t met. Chris goes out and runs into Adam, his old college chum. Adam is one of those butch guys who likes to greet an old pal by throwing a few roughhouse punches. Chris tries to look butch in his rejoinder punches, but they consist of a quick slapping of his splayed-fingered hands against Adam’s chest.
It turns out that Adam wasn’t always so butch; he and Chris had an affair in college, and Chris wouldn’t mind re-starting it. What Adam doesn’t mention — and what we and Chris will learn when Adam shows up at his apartment with Claire — is that he’s engaged. Neither Chris nor Adam let on that they’ve known each other, especially not in the Biblical sense. Matters get more complicated when Adam and Claire find that their plane has been canceled and Sarah suggests that they simply spend the night there. She and Claire will stay in her room so they can stay up all night talking, which leaves Adam to sleep with the still-interested Chris. (A bit contrived, don’t you think? Wouldn’t a couple that’s engaged, a time when they’re at the apex of their sexual interest in each other, prefer to spend the night together?)
Matas makes a big mistake in not showing us the scene when Adam and Chris repair to bed. Instead, he postpones the conversation until some days later, when Adam pooh-poohs what happened between them: “In college, everyone experimented. It was all part of being young.” That’s a point well taken. But Chris has a much better one when he says that, on the night when they ran into each other, Adam never for a second mentioned that he was engaged. Was that because he wanted to resume his relationship with Chris?
Claire is the daughter of Adam’s boss, so Adam doesn’t want to risk his upwardly mobile career with the company by breaking with her. One of the show’s jokes (and salary-saving moves) is that Claire’s father works so hard that he’s never home, so we don’t get to meet him. Unfortunately, Matas writes in Claire’s mother as a one-dimensional homo-hater, apparently to mock all the narrow-minded individuals he’s met in the easiest possible way. The joke is that the mother’s son is nellier than Emory in The Boys in the Band but she never thinks for a second that he might be gay. Another joke is that, during her anti-gay rant, she stabs a long carrot into the anus of the Thanksgiving dinner turkey.
The tag line for the show’s ads is “three lives, two loves, one closet,” and there are some good moments in Perfect Life. Chris’ computer freezes, and the way Adam leans over his shoulder to help suggests that he is indeed sexually interested in his old friend. Later, there’s a scene in which they’re both eating ice cream cones; Chris’s ice cream drips onto his crotch and Adam oh-so-helpfully wipes off the glop. At one point, Adam sings the following prosaic lyrics: “It’s all too late. I have to accept my fate. I’m straight.” But when the first act comes to an end, he and Chris are kissing.
Matas has wisely put a brain in Claire’s head. A lesser writer would have her fail to suspect that she’s running the risk of losing her boyfriend to a guy, but she picks up on the clues extraordinarily well. She discusses the possibility with her mother, who asks, “Does he have limp wrists?” Then mom delivers a pungent line: “Marrying them off was the way to cure them in my day.” She wants Claire to stay engaged because breaking it off would cause “a scandal.” Claire has a good number that moves the action forward, starting with her dilemma and ending with her decision to marry Adam after all.
At the moment, though, Chris and Adam are together but arguing. Chris promised that he’d go see his friend Billy’s gay revue, and Adam doesn’t want to be seen at such an event. Billy plays an important role in Perfect Life for he’s the one who tells Sarah that Adam and Chris have been dating. Sarah is furious on behalf of her friend, and Chris offers the hoariest of reasons why he’s in love with the guy: “Adam makes me laugh.” (We’ve never seen Adam do that, not even once.) Chris’s then sings “When I see that smile, I know that hurt will be worth my while” and “At the end of the day, I’m a better person because of him.”
Suddenly, it’s the day of Claire’s wedding to Adam — and Matas might have impressed us had Paul Rudnick not gotten there before him with In and Out. At the altar, Adam says “I’m gay.” (I’m not sure how legal the marriage would have been anyway, given that director Evan Tsitsias has Claire’s mother officiating.) There’s an epilogue, set some time later, in which Chris and Adam now have a baby, Sarah has a girlfriend, and Claire is seen in a combination wedding dress and straitjacket. I’m not sure that Perfect Life will have much of an epilogue following its engagement at the Poor Alex, but Jet Matas does show flashes of ability as a composer and bookwriter. I hope he concentrates on just one of those tasks when he begins work on his next musical.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
