In the latest in Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS’ annual “Broadway Backwards” series, livestreamed and incredibly star-studded, on March 30, offering new material and past highlights, we’re all invited to Billy’s—Jay Armstrong Johnson—“pity party.” He’s “Waving through a Window,” as he’s eating, drinking, and drugging alone, isolated during this Covid-19 pandemic, with only the divas in his mind—Stephanie J. Block, Deborah Cox, and Lea Salonga—to serenade him and a nasty upstairs neighbor—Sam Gravitte—to qvetch about all the music below. In steps late-night television host Colella—Jenn Colella—to take charge and show “Broadway Baby” Billy all that he’s got to live for. So let the priceless past clips, with men singing women’s songs & women singing men’s songs, begin!
We start with the wickedly appealing, all-male “Cell Block Tango,” with one verse in Spanish, and very gay “(not) Getting Married Today,” with Darren Criss on the tongue-twisting patter part. Then Andrew Rannells gets perfectly Judy with us, changing just one word in “The Man that Got Away”—“a one man man looking for the man that got away”—while “We Want Billy … All I Care about Is Love,” features none other than an elegantly-tuxedoed Chita Rivera as Billy Flynn!
A throw-back, with a twist, to television 60 years ago follows, with Eric Petersen and Garlen Gilliland’s gay-friendly “One Boy/One Girl,” more “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” than “Bye-Bye Birdie,” as they promise to get to know their new young neighbors very well. Bonnie Milligan makes a “Bells Are Ringing” song into a brassy coming out number, as she confides “I Met a Girl,” who turns her head, to Debra Monk and the ensemble. In “Forget about the Boy,” on the other hand, Tony Yazbeck gives himself a stern talking to, and Tituss Burgess follows up with a sincere and sincerely over-the-top “And I Am Telling You I Am not Going.” And if Ariana DeBose, in her white suit, flirting with the ladies, can find that she’s got “A Lot of Livin’ to Do,” then why can’t Billy?
Coming into the home stretch, will Len Cariou’s wistful “The Party’s Over” help snap Billy out of his torpor? Should Andrew Keenan-Bolger, as a frustrated Starbucks barista, fear that he may add his latest, perhaps hetero, crush to a whole “History of Wrong Guys?” Will Michael McElroy and Bryan Terrell Clark, pouring heart and voice into “What about Love,” have better luck?—certainly than a lonely Carolee Carmello, plaintive then belting out “Pity the Child” (“I was a fool and probably queer”)! And in response to them all, Cynthia Erivo fervently urges “Make Them Hear You.”
Along the way the likes of Chasten Buttigeg, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Tony Shaloub, Ben Vereen, and Deborah Messing let us know how Broadway Cares and the Center can help those in distress. And then, in the grandest of finales, kicked off by Colella, such stars as Kelli O’Hara, Bernadette Peters, Robin Roberts, Anderson Cooper, Glenn Close, Eric McCormack, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Cheyenne Jackson reassure Billy that “You Will Be Found”—and maybe that qvetchy, but handsome neighbor can be part of the solution.