Pride Plays presented Mart Crowley’s The Men From the Boys, the 2002 sequel to The Boys in the Band, June 26. The all-star cast includes Mario Cantone, Kevyn Morrow, Telly Leung, and Tony winners Denis O'Hare and Lou Liberatore. After airing, the stream will be available through June 29 in the video above.
The play revisits a handful of characters from Boys in the Band, which won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, approximately 30 years later, with a few new additions to the party. While the predecessor gathered these friends for a birthday party in an era when such a gathering of gay men was illegal, The Men From the Boys reunites the group for a different type of occasion and chronicles how these men have evolved and how different they are from their intergenerational counterparts.
For the returnees, the cast stars Cantone as Emory, Morrow as Bernard, O’Hare as Michael, Liberatore as Harold, Rick Elice as Donald, and Joseph James O’Neil as Hank. For the new arrivals, Leung plays Rick, with Carson McCalley as Scott, and Charlie Carver as Jason. As with all Pride Plays programming, the event serves as a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. For The Men From the Boys, Goldman Sachs will serve as a presenting sponsor and match donations up to $35,000.
On Broadway, The Boys in the Band starred Jim Parsons as Michael, Matt Bomer as Donald, Robin De Jesús as Emory, Tuc Watkins as Hank, Michael Benjamin Washington as Bernard, Zachary Quinto as Harold, and Charlie Carver as Cowboy.
Quinto and Carver both return for this production, this time as director and a brand-new character (Cowboy is not in The Men From the Boys), respectively. William Carlton serves as stage manager with casting by James Calleri, Paul Davis, and Eric Jensen of Calleri Casting.
Produced by Aaron Glick, the presentation is part of the 2020 Pride Plays festival, produced by Michael Urie and Doug Nevin with festival direction by Nick Mayo. This year’s festival includes the previous streams of Donja R. Love’s one in two and Brave Smiles...Another Lesbian Tragedy by The Five Lesbian Brothers and the upcoming Masculinity Max by MJ Kaufman. The festival caps off with the one-night-only Playbill Pride Spectacular concert June 28 at 8PM ET. All programming airs as benefit performances to support Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
Jim Parsons and Matt Bomer in The Boys in the Band
