As Come Out With Pride gets back to in-person events this year, they have partnered with Jamie DeHay’s Unseen Images Theatre to present the first-ever live theater production sanctioned as an official Pride event.
“The Gay 90’s Musical” is a 1994 musical revue originally created by Los Angeles-based playwright David Galligan. Featuring original songs Galligan commissioned from 18 local songwriters, the show looks at what life was like for people in the LGBTQ community during the last decade of the 20th Century.
“It’s a musical romp of gay life in the 1990s,” says Robert Crane, the current show’s director. “It’s hilarious but it is heartwarming at the same time.”
Crane has been a fan of the music of “The Gay 90’s Musical” for a decade now.
“The soundtrack was introduced to me by a friend and I instantly fell in love with it. I thought I have got to do this show,” Crane says. “So I contacted David Galligan 10 years ago and got the go ahead, and I was originally thinking of putting it in the Footlight Theatre at the Parliament House.”
Work and life got in the way, and Crane’s dream to put on the show got put on the backburner, where it seemed destined to stay until earlier this year.
“Robert and I first met each other working on an Orlando Fringe show in 2017 that I was producing, ‘Vampire Lesbians from Sodom,’ and he was cast in that show,” DeHay recalls. “We got to work together again at Fringe this year, he was a part of a show called ‘Fucking Men’ that I produced and directed.”
After their Fringe run, DeHay began to look for his next project and Crane knew he had the perfect show in mind.
“Jamie was talking about ‘what’s next?’ and I turned around and said, ‘listen to this soundtrack and see what you think,’” Crane says.
“When Robert first approached me about the show,” DeHay adds, “he told me it was ‘The Gay 90’s Musical,’ and I was like ‘OK, so it’s a jukebox musical, right? We’re gonna do some Britney Spears, we’re gonna do some *NSYNC’? No, it’s not that at all. It’s 18 great original songs and we decided to pursue it.”
The process of getting the show on track turned out to be easier said than done as the show had never officially been archived.
“Usually when we are doing a show, we go online, apply for the rights and they send you a license, it’s pretty cut and dry,” DeHay says. “This was not like that at all.”
Crane and DeHay began tracking down whoever they could find who had been attached to the show’s original run at Los Angeles’ Celebration Theatre.
“We spent two months Facebook stalking cast members and other people who were listed on the CD who were involved in the show. We eventually got in touch with some of the cast and said ‘We’re trying to bring this back to life, do you have any materials?’” Crane says. “Every one of them kept saying ‘David Galligan, David Galligan, David Galligan.’ Well, David is not a big Facebook person.”
Eventually their persistence paid off and they were able to track down the show’s original pianist and one of the songwriters.
“Keep in mind that in the ‘90s artists didn’t put things on computers, so through this maze of performers and songwriters, we were able to track down the score for ‘The Gay 90’s Musical’ in back of a closet, minus two songs,” Crane says.
Crane and DeHay managed to eventually track down Galligan at the end of July and, after a few Zoom calls, they got the go ahead to do the show. They were also able to track down the missing two songs to be able to perform the full show.
The songs throughout the revue look at many topics that impacted the LGBTQ community in the ‘90s, both comical and tragic, from a straight woman pondering why all the good men are gay and the popularity of the old 976 phone numbers (the “pre-internet instruments of pleasure,” Crane says) to gays serving in the military and the AIDS pandemic.
Crane and DeHay brought together six local talents — Brett McMahon, Jessica Hoehn, Mark Hardin, Kayla Fischl, Daniel Martinez and Lily E. Garnett — and Aaron W. Penfield as the musical director to help bring the show to life.
“There is a lot of the show that is reflective of the ‘90s but there is still so much of the subject matter and the songs that are still so applicable and pertinent today,” Crane says. “No matter what age you are, you’re either going to be young and learned about what happened before you realized you were a homosexual or you’re going to be someone who survived the ‘90s, which was a tough thing to do, and you’re going to be taken back on a wonderful trip.”
The show will also serve as a benefit show, supporting two LGBTQ organizations: Come Out With Pride and the LGBT+ Center Orlando.
“I think the subject matter of the show makes picking those two organizations a no brainer,” DeHay says. “We are running concurrent with Come Out With Pride, as an official Come Out With Pride event, and The Center does amazing work and they unfortunately had some of their funding cut this year, so we want to help them out as much as we can.”
“The Gay 90’s Musical” will play at The Starlight Room located inside Savoy Orlando on Oct. 1, 2, 7 and 8 starting at 7:30 p.m. and on Oct. 3 and 10 starting at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 each with a portion of the proceeds from each performance going to benefit Come Out With Pride and the LGBT+ Center Orlando. Tickets can be purchased here.
