Uptown Players, Dallas area's only gay-centric theater company, opened Douglas Carter Beane's hilarious, heartfelt musical about a 1937 era gay burlesque performer in New York. ”The Nance” was a term for an actor who portrayed a gay person on stage in a time when being gay could land one in jail, but portraying one onstage was allowed.
The story centers on Chauncey Miles (B.J. Cleveland), a gay performer, looking for a fleeting affair. The scene opens with Chauncey sitting at a table at an automat known to the gay community as a pick-up location. Enter Ned (Sterling Gafford). The play follows the connection, affair, and eventual break-up of Chauncey and Ned interspersed with stage performances by Chauncey and his second banana, Efram (Bob Hess) in a comedy act chock full of double entendres and backed up by three stereotypical chorines (Linda Leonard, Brett Warner, and Sherry Hopkins).
Chauncey invites Ned to stay at his small Greenwich Village apartment and freshen up, but here is where verisimilitude suffers. We see Ned in the bathtub obviously enjoying feeling clean; however, after supposedly being in a tub full of water, he stands up, steps out of the tub, and to turn a phrase, is bone dry. Chauncey hands him a towel which Ned wraps around his waist without attempting to dry off. (Details, guys; an audience notices these gaffes.)
One of the funniest sketches in the burlesque act is the classic: "Slowly I Turn" which Hess enacts with superior panache, with Cleveland playing the straight (no pun intended) man at the Irving Place Theater. Lucille Ball revived this sketch in a 1950s episode of “I Love Lucy.” We meet the chorines in the theater's dressing room as they dish about life and the LaGuardia era politics as well as their on stage performances. Linda Leonard stands out, with Brett Warner and Sherry Hopkins also turning in excellent and comical performances.
