So, yes, I’m doing these out of order. That’s just the kind of hard-living rebel I am. The #ListenWider challenge comes via this page. And, I’ll be doing a little scribble about each one as I tick them off.
This is Challenge 4: The cast recording of a musical featuring a queer character
So here goes …
I used to start all my university essays with a pointless digression defining words. It made me feel smart. But I’m starting this with a digression about defining queer because, for me, when I was growing up, it was an insult. Flat out. If anyone had reclaimed it then no one had told us. People were, in my little corner of northern England, still pissed off that ‘they’ had ‘stolen’ the word ‘gay’, The idea that queer might be a positive term was scarcely conceivable.
But the world turns. So my thanks to Sophie Saint Thomas in Cosmo who has a handy paragraph that I’m going to use: Queer is a word that clarifies that I’m not straight and ties me to the larger queer community, but it doesn’t categorize me as gay. The vagueness of the term is intentional— queer is an identity created for anyone outside of the heterosexual norm and meant to be inclusive and create a sense of acceptance.
Digression over. It’s fair to say that most musicals, especially in any contemporary stagings, are going to be able to feature characters that are outside the heterosexual norm. Singing about feelings, actually having feelings, is probably not on most straight men’s list of everyday experiences. But I’m not going to cheat. I’m going all in.
Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens premiered in 1989 and was created by Janet Hood and Bill Russell in response to the names featured on the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 1992/3 it came to London and has been revived there and elsewhere multiple times since. Its genesis and first stagings coincide exactly in time with the period I’m talking about above. The time when for a fair number of people, homosexuality was always wrong and for a good proportion of folk with those views: AIDS was a deserved punishment. Thankfully, because many good people fought and fought harder, those views are not nearly as mainstream, even if they do still exist. Elegies is almost a period piece but it can still seem a vital work.
Bill Russell’s page has a useful bit about Elegies … which explains what’s going on so I don’t have to. Here.
The Original London Cast recording that I listened to is on Spotify – here:
So what do I think? Well, I’ve had the whole album on pretty heavy rotation for the past day or so. So it’s doing something right. The tunes are simple, fun and direct, the lyrics clear and clever, and, in this album at least, it’s over and done without outstaying its welcome. There will be a couple of tracks that find their way onto my other playlists. A definite winner.
The quilt that inspired the musical is now, according to wiki, the largest single piece of folk art in the world. In 2020, it will move to a new permanent home in San Francisco. In its archive, it has more than 200,000 pieces connected to people who have died of AIDS.
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