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The timing for the premiere of If I Loved You: Gentlemen Prefer Broadway, a night of classic Broadway love duets sung exclusively by men, couldn’t have been more serendipitous. The event took place in Toronto only two days after Canadians in the province of Ontario overwhelmingly elected its first female, openly gay premier and only about a week before the city’s massive Pride Week. Curated by Rufus Wainwright and featuring guest appearances from David Byrne, Boy George, Ezra Koenig and a handful of others, the show felt especially charged with ideas of inclusivity and tolerance.
The idea behind If I Loved You is simple: take a handful of Broadway love duets and recontextualize them, handing over the female parts to male singers. It’s the kind of hook that has the potential to slide into novelty, but in the hands of such diverse and idiosyncratic performers, it ended up slyly nodding to not only preconceived notions about traditional gender roles both male and female, but also touching on the potentially corrosive nature of heteronormativity and the importance of representation in popular culture.
Political and cultural significance aside, the production was, for lack of a more appropriately evocative word, beautiful. Wainwright, the son of Loudon Wainwright III, cut his teeth as a showman and acted as the night’s perfect MC and performer, his charisma and love for Broadway on full display while adding levity and humor to the evening. Broadway tunes are often stilted by nature, the interplay between music, lyrics and stage presence necessarily rigid; but perhaps because this was the first time the show had been put on stage, there was a greater sense of spontaneity to the evening, from Wainwright planting a kiss on Koenig at the end of a “We Kiss in a Shadow” to Wainwright’s winking opening Cole Porter number “I Hate Men”. The ease with which Koenig’s vocals fit in alongside the more theatrical stylings of the other performers was perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening, though such range and emotive force was certainly evident on last year’s Modern Vampires of the City.
If I Loved You was at turns lighthearted and boisterous, balancing between nods to the gender swapping lyrical turns—like Wainwright changing the female pronoun in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady–and odes to love more generally. Wainwright teamed up with Byrne on a low-key rendition of “Something Good” from The Sound of Music, which saw Byrne playing guitar and adding a droll sense of humor to the lyrical exploration of karma and morality. Boy George brought significant flair and charisma to songs such as “You’re the Top” and “My Man’s Gone Now” while Brennan Hall used his staggering soprano to blend levity and braggadocio on “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outa My Hair”. Ending the night with a group rendition of “Summer Nights” from Grease may have been a little too on the nose, but who’s really going to argue against Koenig and Boy George singing the parts of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta to each other?
The underlying thesis of the night, complementing the fever of Pride Week and the election of Ontario’s first openly gay Premier, was best outlined by Wainwright before he sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”. “I think this song is the best representation of true love,” he said, “because it’s mundane." Mundane, yes, but also universal. No matter which pronouns were being used or who was singing the words of Porter, Steven Sondheim or Irving Berlin, there was a pervasive sense that this show was about the many definitions of love, from romantic to filial, to love for art, literature, nature and other people. The show delivered a message not just about equality and representation, but also about how popular culture can, and perhaps necessarily does, soundtrack, document, critique and contextualize history.