Drew Droege’s hilarious show Bright Colors and Bold Patterns just barely made it in under the wire for 2016. I went the very last night on Dec. 30. I sat front row center with Maxim‘s Susan Kilenny and we laughed so hard we got funny looks from our seat mates. It’s a one-man show but Gerry isn’t alone onstage, he talks to his (invisible) fellow gays, or rather harangues them for over an hour, and it couldn’t be more entertaining.
As played by devastatingly funny Droege, Gerry would whelm even the gayest gay over, in real life. He arrives in a whirl of wind in Palm Springs for the gay wedding of a classmate and is soon complaining to boyfriends Mack and Dwayne about the wording of the wedding invite, which tells guests to please
“refrain from wearing bright colors and bold patterns.”
This directive is TOO much for Gerry, as he reads the room itself, saying, it looks like,
“Trina Turk and Betsey Johnson threw up Bacardi Razz –and sold it to Target.“
Mack comes to the house’s defense but Gerry corrects the 23 year-old,.
“No, I love it. Honey, we celebrate things and make fun of them at the same time. That’s called gay.”
As the play goes on we learn Gerry’s beef isn’t just with invite demands but with the notion of gay weddings in general.
“Aren’t you just a little bit scared?. That all of a sudden, we’re in this race to be normal, whatever that means. Is that really the goal?”
The play was expertly directed by Michael Urie who knows a thing or two about solo shows starring in Jonathan Tolins’s Streisand-worshiping play, Buyer & Cellar. Droege is probably best known himself for his Chloë videos, a BROAD parody of the actress Chloë Sevigny.
The production was surprisingly moving and much like Droege’s Chloë videos (there’s a newish one down below) I’m sort of dying to see it again, so let’s hope it will run somewhere in NYC or L.A. the spring. We need more “hot mess” in our lives, on stage, anyway.
