Picture this. You’re living in Great Britain in the years before 1991, the glorious pre-irony years where no one imagined a bunch of stupid apps ruining the world. Computers are taking off. Princes are getting married. Michael Jackson isn’t British, but he has some pretty good music. Your leader is so cuddly and personable you nickname her the Iron Lady. Sure, the AIDs epidemic is raging, and you’re at war with Argentina, but every era has its problems. But problems. Problems are bad, guys. And you know what the root problem of AIDs is? Gay people exist. The Conservatives said let’s fix that! They passed Section 28, a bill which prohibited schools and local governments from “promoting” homosexuality, whatever that means.
So that sucks. Not a fan. You know who else wasn’t a fan? Filmmaker Derek Jarman. Inspired by Section 28, Jarman set about filming his 1991 postmodern critical darling, Edward II, adapted from the Christopher Marlowe play of the same name. Quick rundown: Edward II isn’t a great king, he has a love affair with this commoner Gaveston whom he keeps giving political power, and, fed up, his wife Isabella leads a coup with this dude Mortimer. Gaveston is killed. Edward’s deposed. Ed and Izzy’s son, Edward III, takes the throne, and he tosses his mom and Mortimer in jail. The film sets this Elizabethan drama in 1991 and makes it super queer. When Edward fights Gaveston’s forces, he and his allies are gay rights advocates clashing with the police. Parliament’s problems with Eddie stem from him being gay more than sucking at the whole king thing. There’s a gay sex scene. A 90’s music video. Tilda Swinton is there. At the end, Edward III puts on his mom’s lipstick and listens to music. It takes this gay tragedy, puts in images of modern Britain, and defies the detractors by showing that there will always be queer people.
Critics loved it. It made the political struggles visceral. It pointed out the Gay Tragedy.
In the years since, people realized Section 28 was pretty awful. They tried to overturn it a few times, but were blocked by some Notorious Assholes.
Show pictures of Theresa May, Baroness Young, and David Cameron.
Insane morons in the US have tried their own versions, most infamously Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill.
Section 28 was overturned in 2003. Over in the US, that same year, the Supreme Court finally decides that hey, gay sex shouldn’t be illegal, that’s dumb. (Lawrence v. Texas)
Now *what* does that have to do with the campy Broadway jukebox musical Head Over Heels? Well, strap in. The critics may have hated it, but Head Over Heels is the most important piece of queer art I’ve ever seen.
One - Head Over Heels: The Musical: The Show
Head Over Heels is a jukebox musical that uses music of the Go-Gos to tell The Countess of Pembroke Arcadia by Sir Phillip Sidney. It originally opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a book by Jeff Whitty. After some, uh, events, Whitty’s book was adapted by James Magruder, and that’s the show I saw on Broadway. So… what happens in the show?
In ye olde ancient times, Arcadia is a nation governed by the “beat,” i.e. traditionalism. The opening number had a really cool table pounding dance section. We’ve got the King, the Queen, and two princesses: Pamela, gorgeous and annoyed with her suitors, and Philoclea, hopeless romantic in love with sheep boy Musidorus. The snake-fiend oracle warns that the beat is going to die if four things happen: Philoclea sleeps with a dude the king doesn’t like. Pamela will get married without a husband. He and his wife will do an adultery. And he’ll give the throne to a better king. So, the king decides, of course, to take his family on a roadtrip to avoid all that nonsense. Musi proposes, gets the no from the king, follows, and starts crossdressing as “Cleophila.”
On the road, Pamela’s servant Mopsa is all like “You’re a lesbian. Relatable content.” And Pamela is all “What? You’re fired.” Insert angst. Good ol Musi is accidentally seducing king, queen, and daughter. Mopsa comes back. Pamela and Mopsa confess. Musi and Philo do too. Yay, love. Two prophecies fulfilled.
King and Queen both try to seduce Cleo. They end up in a dark cave and sleep with each other. In a convoluted way, that’s adultery committed with each other. Another prophecy done. Musi’s identity is revealed to all, the King goes to kill him. Success. Yay, murder! After Philoclea does a sad song, the King resigns, makes his wife king, and bam, all prophecies fulfilled. The beat is dead. Suprise suprise, Musi comes back to life because we’re doing progress! Musi and Philo decide to get married. Pamela and Mopsa are like “we’re lesbians” and everyone is all “what is lesbians? But yay love.” Then snake oracle arrives and turns out to Mopsa’s non-binary mother. They’re accepted back into the kingdom, Musi is all like “I liked being Cleo, I’m gender fluid.” The queen is all like “Don’t disappear husband, you’re like… kind of cool now.” They go back to the capital. Yayyyy!
So imagine all of that. The dialogue is in ye olden verse and the songs are all Go-Gos hits. Fun bright colors, costume moments that were delightfully odd, not much attempt at making the songs work, and fun dance numbers.
It… was not well received. I saw the show on January 6, 2019. Closing night. I was in New York for a “study away” semester over the winter, a brief and heavily packed trip with other students in my college’s theatre department. I was taking an honors course in theatrical criticism. Of all the plays we were going to see, this was the one I was looking forward to the least. The few reviews I looked at beforehand were not great. One of the pre-trip focuses my class took was looking at the transphobic New York Times review. The department alumni we met in NYC before we saw the show talked about how much they didn’t like it and how pretty much everyone they knew didn’t like it. I knew it was going to be camp, whether that was on purpose or not, and it starred Miss Peppermint, famously a contestant of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 9. I hadn’t watched Drag Race at that point, and all I knew of it were clips from Untucked of people being loud and rude, so I was expecting to be quite… annoyed.
But, well…
Two - Head Over Heels: The Musical: The Breakdown
To this day, that night in the packed closing night of the campy, high-energy musical is the single most gut wrenching experience I’ve ever had consuming a piece of art. Sure, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Barbie all made me tear up, but Head Over Heels made me into a sobbing mess. From the moment we left the theatre until we got back to the hostel, I could hardly talk. I have a very, very rare stutter. It came out that night.
If you’re thinking, this vaguely sounds like a fairytale, you’re right. It’s Disney-esque, just more grown up. Happy endings. I was already crying on the lead up to the final moments, but when the oracle was revealed to be non-binary and her ex-husband immediately, proudly sang, “I’m mad about them!” Well… I’m a cis man, but that broke me. I legitimately started to bawl. My face was a mess. Everyone around me was happy and cheering. When Pamela and Mopsa reveal their relationship, there’s no homophobic turmoil. Their parents accept it full on. This was a story where LGBT+ people weren’t the villains. They weren’t victims. They weren’t tragic. This was a story we got happy endings.
Immediately after the show, it clicked for me. Until that point, I’d never seen someone like me get their happy ending. Not in a fairy tail. Here was a happily ever after. And even though you grow up and realize life is more complicated than true love, like children watching a Disney movie, seeing the idea for the first time that it can happen for you gives you an overwhelming hope. I was 17 when gay marriage passed. I lived in a very small town in Kentucky. I could get married. I wanted to. Love has always been my deepest desire. I’m a hopeless romantic. But my depression and a degree of internalized homophobia said I wasn’t going to get that chance. When I saw this show, I was 20. I’d never kissed anyone. This show told me… happiness is possible.
When I watched Head Over Heels, I was out to the majority of people in my life, but I wasn’t yet out to my parents. Coming out had always been terrifying for me. Despite the era of It Gets Better, which is true, my media exposure to LGBT+ people, outside of caricature, had been the Gay Tragedy. Flowers for Bobby was the first gay movie I watched. Angels in America, Rent!, Aids aids aids death. In middle school, I browsed Yahoo! News for stories about gay marriage, and I wouldn’t read the article at all. I went straight to the comments. I wanted to get married. I wanted happily ever after. I was obsessed with the comments say gay people were all disgusting groomers trying to turn children to our disease. Anita Bryant type bigotry. The right never learns new material. All those things combined into a messy, scribbled sticker, and it stuck. It was like I was a masochist, but the pleasure center of my brain broke, and I kept re-clicking and hurting myself for no reason.
One of the first plays I saw as a freshman theatre major was a production of Dog Sees God, which is a hilarious script and it was a good production. Major spoiler alert here, but in it, homophobia leads to suicide. “Can’t you see, homophobia is bad.” There’s power in those sort of stories of course. We should be telling all the stories about all the things. I’m in love with art and always have been.
But Head Over Heels was the first time a major piece of fiction gave me a happy ending. At least, that’d I’d seen up til then. I was terrified of running into Gay Tragedy. I was scared of my parents finding out my secret. Reading shounen ai manga was really the one thing that generally had a positive, safe vibe about it. Fluffy little nonsense.
LGBT+ people deserve to see themselves, and to be seen, in more than just tragedies. Seeing is transformative. Earlier this year, I watched Red, White, & Royal Blue. I love that film. I love that it was popular. I love that it was loved. I want more.
One thing that comes up all the time when talking about representation is the need for “good” representation. What people mean when they say that is always up in the air. Sometimes it means that the roles are brief or the queerness is nearly entirely hidden, see a lot of the Disney live action movies. “Good” here means more than a moment easily clipped away for foreign censors. Sometimes it’s from moralizers who can’t handle art and want every queer person to be a precious child handled with pure delicacy, have no faults, and experience few problems. “Good” here means “a non-character who experiences a non-plot.” Sometimes it’s anti-didactism. Sometimes it’s anti-stereoptype. The most common meaning I’ve found incredibly recently is meaning that the text should be “objectively” good.
So. Let’s talk about quality.
Three - Head Over Heels: The Musical: The Flop
There is no such thing as objectively good art. Sorry.
More importantly than that, there has long been a push for quote unquote “worthy” art. Everything must be the best or it feels like a waste of time. Insert the Chef from the film The Menu choosing to kill an actor because he was in a film the Chef thought was bad. The result is a lessening of art. Because we’re consuming it as content. And we only want the best meals. We don’t allow things to be mediocre. We don’t allow things to be silly. Mid-budget romcoms with dumb plots used to be a true force in this country. Everything has to either be amazing or the worst, time-wasting endeavor to exist. Things can’t be boring, they can’t be outside of our taste, so on and so forth. I actually have a theory that part of the reason for the proliferation of AI “art” is the fear of being “bad” at art, and the amount of internet points you get for dunking on someone’s work, no matter how far along in their artistic journey they are. Nothing quite gets clicks like hate.
Our study away group toured NYPAL, the New York Performing Arts Library, and talked to one of the people in charge of the video archives. NYPAL records select Broadway and off-Broadway shows and stores those videos for archival and research purposes. We asked if they had recorded Head over Heels. They hadn’t.
I don’t recall if it was connected to HoH or if it was a different part of the conversation, but he explained that it’s hard to get people to sign off on the contracts needed for licensing reasons to get the archival footage, and this is made especially hard for jukebox musicals where there can be plenty of song-writers that need to be asked. In case you’re wondering, Spongebob: The Musical is in the archives. He said hard choices have to be made because of their limited funding, and they try to record things that they believe are historically or culturally significant. Sometimes they’ll record a show because of a significant cast change, for instance. We saw a revival of My Fair Lady. The lead actress was going to change. So they were going to get a second recording of this specific revival because of this historic and significant lead cast change.
Head Over Heels was the first Broadway show to have a role originated by a trans actress. But, alas, it wasn’t culturally or historically significant enough.
I’ve tried my best to assume he simply didn’t want to talk about how they failed to get the rights, but after reading an account by Jeff Whitty, it seems like the Go-Gos and their label were heavily involved in the process. Would sync rights really be that hard to come by with the literal artists working with the show?
When we talked about the NYPAL experience as a class later, we tried to rationalize it. We tried to understand how so many people hated it and how they had to be clearly right. Many of us were queer or close to queer people, and we were young and used to camp. Maybe it was simply a niche show. A niche show that all thirty of us loved, the same group that had major, passionate disagreements about Frozen and My Fair Lady.
In my opinion which I know is not fact, most revivals are put out for a niche audience of old people trying to pretend their boring plots and characters are still the height of culture, and the young people suckered into believing in cultural capital and “high art” and other bullshit. But no one calls the shows made for those people niche. You want to watch a revival of a famously sexist musical pretending to be feminist now because they sort of changed the blocking? Well, we’ll make sure to get multiple versions of that show!
Maybe Head Over Heels was niche. It was camp. And campy things like Cher, Gaga, ridiculous fashion shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, you know, musicals - all of those were niche and unsuccessful.
The thought I had at the moment was that queer stories are acclaimed when we suffer and die, but when we’re happy and over-the-top, we’re niche. We’re poppy nonsense. Our existence constitutes us as our own genre.
The show also suffered and died. It didn’t last long on Broadway. The Tony’s shut it out. It didn’t make much money. A flop.
Four - Head Over Heels: The Musical: The Tragedy
I wrote a version of this script a couple of years ago. I mostly repurposed that script. While I was diong that, I googled the plot to refresh myself when writing the brief summary. In doing so, I came across an open letter posted online by Jeff Whitty, the writer of the original book.
This is a tricky thing to talk about. I wasn’t able to find any independent reporting confirming or denying the details of his story. The allegations are significant and heartbreaking. If these heavy hitters behaved as he claims, then disturbing misconduct happened in the transformation from the show’s Oregon Shakes production to its Broadway run.
I am a musical theatre writer. I’ve written the book for three musicals. I did the lyrics and music for four. This is the world in which I live. Theatre is my everything, and Head Over Heels is an insanely important story to me, for me, my development in my relationship with myself and my place in the world.
Yet there’s potential that this thing I loved was the result of insane pain.
I want to make clear that Jeff Whitty’s allegations are allegations. I don’t know how true they are, and I would like for some further reporting to come out and update us on the story. If there are abusive people in the musical theatre industry, we need to clean house. And if they’re exonerated, we need to know that too so we don’t burn them at the stake.
One thing I know for sure is that Whitty is right in saying that art is insanely personal. People online love to shout at creative types that we need a thick skin. They don’t mean that as advice to help us get through the world. That would be something. No, it’s meant to say, “We will continue being as cruel to you and what you make as we want. If that ever hurts you, that’s your fault. We can never be blamed. You must always be game. You may not complain.”
There is a sincere difference between criticism and cruelty.
When I put on my first musical at my college, it wasn’t merely critiqued. It was torn apart. “Why did we pay for this?” There were people who made fun of me for it, teased me about the ways they or other people hated it. Certain members of the production revealed their own issues and eye-rolls at the show, things they never shared with me while we were creating, ignoring the ways in which you make things better. Professors, too, weren’t kind about it. I went out of my way not to talk to anyone about the show. It sincerely hurt. I wasn’t the only one my department was cruel to that semester. There was something in the water. Cruelty is easy to coat yourself in, call it an opinion, and then laugh at how it hurts someone. The point is merely taking someone down.
Sharing your art is terrifying. Even when you’re proud and confident, when you’re open to criticism, the ways in which it and you are treated can be… horrid. I think we can all do with a little less “take downs” and little more grace. When I read new work, I focus on the things I love. Someone has to. You don’t grow only from pruning.
Five - Head Over Heels: The Musical: The Impact
If there was a Happily Ever After Disney movie with a lesbian princess or a gay prince, I would have spent less years hating myself. I’m certain of that.
The thing about ridiculous optimism, the sort you see in movies where everything is wrapped up in a tight little bow, is that it gets you to imagine what your life would be like in a perfect world. If you never see yourself or someone like you in these imaginings? If you aren’t represented, then these perfect worlds don’t include you. Something about you is other and needs to be fixed.
The animated short In a Heartbeat went viral when it was posted online. People wept when they saw it. It’s a short film about a boy who has a crush on another boy and tries to keep it a secret, but his heart literally beats out his chest and betrays him. The two boys connect, and their hearts embrace. It’s sweet. It’s silly. It’s optimistic. If it is so happy, why the tears?
Hope, when placed in the home of despair or loneliness, makes us emotional. Watching the short made a lot of adults yearn for having had something similar when they were children. It filled them with happiness. It gave them peace that this younger generation does have this hope, that they have the ridiculous dreams of happily ever after that everyone else gets to dream about.
Head Over Heels inspired me to make my own children’s musical, one that features a gay love story. Three Wolves Howling went up at my college in fall 2019. The show has changed a lot since then for the better, but working on and showing children a happily ever after that I was denied seeing for so long? Something about that felt… right. After it closed, I immediately came out to everyone I wasn’t already out to. I had hope.
Hope is a beautiful gift to give.
End of Essay.
Comments