While the ladies of The Gilded Age waged a cutthroat war over opera boxes across the entire second season of the HBO hit, one of the gays of the 1880s-set drama quietly crept closer to an arguably more meaningful victory.
In a brief but significant scene, socialite John Adams — portrayed by out gay Broadway musical man Claybourne Elder — informs his very closeted ex, Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson), that he’s involved with another man. “Are you happy with him?” asks Oscar. “I’m happy with me. That’s as much as I need or hope for,” John Adams replies, landing his giant leap towards liberation, as Oscar continues his hunt for a beard.
“When I read that scene, I was so excited,” Elder says over a relaxed, morning video call. “It felt like [we were] telling a story that wasn’t just…’Why the gay guy is going to be really sad and have everything bad happen to him,’ [but that] there could be a person that was like, ‘No, I’m going to live an authentic life,’ in that time period, for whatever that means for him.”
As Elder notes of Gilded Age New York, “it was technically illegal still to be gay, but there were a lot of gay people. There were a lot of gay clubs and gay bars. And so it isn’t a total fantasy to think that there was a person that was like, ‘No, I’m sort of living this life.'” In that moment between John and Oscar, the latter concedes he wishes he were brave enough to live so freely. “I rather envy you,” he tells John.
In turn, both men surely would envy the life Elder leads a century and a half later: out, successful, married to director-playwright Eric Rosen, the father of a six-year-old son, and free to delight audiences everywhere with a show that explicitly discusses — sometimes really explicitly — his modern life as “a nice, gay ex-Mormon dad.”
Billed as part cabaret, part stand-up, Elder’s If the Stars Were Mine started with his intention, after wrapping his 2022 run as Andy in Broadway’s Company, to take a theater break in order to spend more time with his young son. He also was open to exploring other venues for his talents.
“My music director [Rodney Bush], who plays the show with me everywhere, is a good friend of mine, and he was like, you need to put together a show,” Elder recalls. The performer had previously toured a different cabaret set, and, though he had a great time doing it, he harbored no plans for a new one. But something about the timing felt right.
“So I put the show together and I booked some dates, and I ended up just loving it,” says Elder, who has presented If the Stars Were Mine at clubs and cabarets from coast to coast, with many more to follow (when he’s not filming The Gilded Age‘s upcoming third season). “I thought last year was going to be the big year I did it, but this year, now I’ve booked it at twice as many places.”
Conceived by Elder, If the Stars Were Mine combines his takes on tunes from Sondheim, Whitney Houston, and the Great American Songbook, with humorous, heartfelt, and “surprisingly filthy” anecdotes exploring sex, fatherhood, and religion.
“I have done this show for a very wide range of people,” he says, clarifying just how filthy his fans should expect the show to be. “I did it in Provincetown during Bear Week, and I did it in Napa at a vineyard for a bunch of Napa people. Those, I think, are the two very opposite spectrums of the group. And it’s the same show. Maybe I change the words slightly, but I tell the same stories and the same things.”
Claybourne Elder — Photo: Austin Ruffer
And even a good man gets a little dirty at times. “This is just me,” he shrugs. “Also, because of who I am as a nice, gay ex-Mormon dad, I don’t want people to come in thinking, ‘Oh, what is he saying?’
“Because the authentic version of myself is sometimes a little bit dirty, and definitely honest. And if I’m telling stories about my life, there will be stories that are about sex, and things like that. And not even just sex, but like, I tell a story about when I donated sperm to make my son, which some people think I talk about sperm a lot in that story. I just don’t want anyone to be surprised by what it is.”
If the Stars Were Mine plays Kingston, New York (March 9), Albany, New York (March 10), Salt Lake City (March 21-24), New Orleans (April 18), New Hope, Pennsylvania (May 4), and Provincetown, Mass. (July 7).
Back in May, just after our 31st anniversary, I asked readers which of four classic cover interviews from our early years they'd like to see in print again: Greg Louganis (March 9, 1995), Sir Ian McKellen (Jan. 25, 1996), Camille Paglia (Feb. 1, 1996), or Eartha Kitt (Nov. 14, 1996). None of these conversations exist online, and they haven't been seen since their original print dates.
Out of more than 200 responses, 8% chose Paglia, 27% picked Louganis, 29% went for McKellen, and an impressive 36% cast their vote for Kitt.
Kitt, who passed away in December 2008, seemed a fitting choice to revisit. A pop culture icon for her turn as the second Catwoman (following Julie Newmar) on the late-1960s, camp-classic TV series Batman, she was slated to appear at Washington's legendary jazz nightclub Blues Alley when we spoke.
"It was kind of confusing," David Archuleta says, recalling the time roughly 16 years ago when he was first asked to write a memoir. "What am I supposed to talk about? I'm 18 years old, and I feel like I'm just starting my journey, and you want me to write a memoir now?"
That memoir, Chords of Strength: A Memoir of Soul, Song, and the Power of Perseverance, was written by Archuleta with Monica Haim and published by an imprint of Penguin Group in 2010. He was barely an adult at the time, and it had only been two years since he competed on American Idol, becoming the season seven runner-up.
The marvelous cast of Signature's musical Play On! kick up their heels and sing up a storm in a vivacious new production staged by Lili-Anne Brown. Originally conceived by Sheldon Epps, with a book by Cheryl L. West, the three-time Tony-nominated musical employs a bevy of jazz and blues standards by D.C.'s own Duke Ellington, laced through a romantic comedy plot inspired by Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
Turns out, the Bard and the Duke complement each other well. Twelfth Night's tale of a cross-dressing waif embroiled in a convoluted matchmaking scheme cuts a fine figure upon which to hang Play On!'s 1940s backstage romance set amongst the all-Black cast and crew at Harlem's storied Cotton Club.
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