In my pre­vi­ous col­umn, I told you how eager I was to start this promis­ing sea­son of excit­ing shows and hot male per­form­ers show­ing some skin on stage. Well, it seems like it even went beyond my hopes. Le cabaret des hommes per­dus, with its not-for-every­one theme (the rise and fall of a gay porn star), was, as you can imag­ine, an eye feast, whether the cast is wear­ing cos­tumes, or not. Nudi­ty apart, the show is real­ly a ter­rif­ic and orig­i­nal piece of musi­cal the­atre. How often do you get a musi­cal that fea­tures a song flaunt­ing the virtues of close ups in porn film tech­nique, as well as nam­ing a few gay porn stars? I have to admit that I felt a bit lost at times. I’m not an expert at gay porn name­drop­ping so I was more than eager to google some names. Isn’t it fas­ci­nat­ing and inspir­ing when musi­cal the­atre opens up new fields of knowl­edge? For The Ten Com­mand­ments I had to read both Tes­ta­ments in order to under­stand the plot. For Le cabaret des hommes per­dus, I had to go trough some pic­tures of male anato­my. The lat­ter was more fun (research AND show).

It seems like gay porn fan­tasies is the theme this sea­son. If if I bring up the top­ic of sol­diers, slaves and glad­i­a­tors, you might think I’ve been googling too much and that I should get a life. But the thing is: male physique is get­ting main­stream and is even invad­ing the Stade de France (the huge sta­di­um where France won the World Soc­cer Cup back in, uh, when was that?). Last month, for five per­for­mances only, French direc­tor Robert Hos­sein brought Ben Hur to life. Hossein’s pro­duc­tions are leg­endary if not appre­ci­at­ed by every­one. He likes to tack­le big­ger-than-life biopics and has a thing for inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. One of his hits was a show about Marie-Antoinette where the audi­ence could vote. Should the Queen has her head chopped off? Yes? No?
The whole con­cept kind of scares me, espe­cial­ly when I think that Hos­sein direct­ed the very first ver­sion of Les Mis­érables in Paris back in the ear­ly 1980’s. For some rea­son, Hos­sein hasn’t stuck much to musi­cal the­atre after­wards. Is it a loss? Prob­a­bly not but think of the pos­si­bil­i­ties any­way. Should Kim kill her­self at the end of Miss Saigon? Yes? No? Should all the Cats gets killed in the open­ing sequence? Yes? Yes? Should the chan­de­lier fall upon Christine’s head while she’s per­form­ing her annoy­ing vocalis­es in Phan­tom? Think about it.

But let’s get back to Ben Hur. Robert Hos­sein is not a direc­tor who likes his pro­duc­tions small and inti­mate. For Ben Hur, he had, not 50, not 100 peo­ple in the are­na but 250. Yes, 250 young studs por­tray­ing sol­diers or slaves (let’s not men­tion the 50 female dancers: a teardrop in this sea of testos­terone). It was like a giant dis­play of soft­core erot­i­ca. And what’s the dif­fer­ence between soft­core and hard­core? The close-ups, of course. And in this huge venue, there was no way to get the full details on the cast. Let’s say, that at least, every­one seemed fit.
See­ing this sea of human bod­ies, some cru­cial ques­tions went through my dizzy head. Do the cast mem­bers get to call each oth­er by their num­ber? “Hey, 199, how are you today?” And, after the show, can all these peo­ple take their show­er at the same time? I guess some ques­tions shall remain unanswered.

Sep­tem­ber is also that time of the year when the French rug­by men bare it all for a wor­thy cause (which one by the way?), it’s that spe­cial time of the year when the infa­mous cal­en­dar is being released and hon­est­ly, each year gets hot­ter. Close ups are only one inch away! A few years ago, “porn chic” was every­where. Let’s all for­get about the “chic” part of it now.