The Big Gay Jamboree

Musical Theatre Licked Clean and Drenched in Glitter

Orpheum Theatre, New York City

Let’s start with the facts: The Big Gay Jamboree is big, it’s gay, and—bless it—it is absolutely a jamboree. But more than that, it’s a rhinestone-covered Molotov cocktail tossed straight into the heart of Golden Age musical nostalgia. And reader, it sings.

We open on Stacey (played with boozy, baffled brilliance by co-writer Marla Mindelle), a queer theatre grad drowning in disappointment and vodka sodas. Her reward? Waking up trapped inside a 1940s Technicolor musical so saccharine it should come with a dental warning. Welcome to Bareback, Idaho—a town where nobody swears, queerness is coded at best, and women are told to smile more with the force of a show tune. In short: Stacey has landed in Broadway’s conservative underbelly.

What unfolds is both satire and seduction. This is not just a musical—it’s a surgical queering of the form. Mindelle, alongside her co-creators Jonathan Parks-Ramage and Philip Drennen, takes the genre’s most beloved tropes and lovingly bludgeons them with sequins and truth. Every over-the-top tap break, every whispered “golly gee,” is an opportunity to dismantle the deeply hetero, deeply white myths we’ve been spoon-fed since Rogers met Hammerstein.

And yet, despite its acid tongue, Jamboree is never cynical. Its heart, like its choreography, beats hard. Stacey teams up with three fellow misfits—the ferociously horny Flora (Natalie Walker, a walking eye-roll of divine chaos), Clarence (Paris Nix, giving gospel realness with a wink to tokenism), and Bert (Constantine Rousouli, all flannel and loneliness). Together they rework the town—and the genre—from the inside out.

There’s real joy here. Not the tidy, toothless joy of legacy musicals, but the messy, unapologetic joy of queer resistance. Connor Gallagher’s direction is a masterclass in chaos control, balancing slapstick and sincerity with pirouette precision. Dots’ design of rolling green hills and picket-fenced repression is cartoonish and claustrophobic, while Aaron Rhyne’s video projections inject a fizzy, hallucinatory edge.

The show’s musical numbers? Delicious. Think Oklahoma! on poppers. Standouts include “Let’s Get Hetero Tonight” (a send-up of compulsory straightness that had the audience howling) and “A Little Less Plot, A Little More Slut,” which I fully expect to be my summer anthem. Sure, not every number lands—"The Back-Up Plan" feels like filler—but even the duds are delivered with such campy conviction that you almost forgive them.

Is it loud? Yes. Is it messy? Gloriously. Does it pander? Sometimes—but only to the queers in the room. And if that bothers you, this probably isn’t your musical.

What The Big Gay Jamboree ultimately asks is this: What happens when the people who’ve always been punchlines write the script? The answer, thankfully, is chaos. Glittery, horny, heartfelt chaos. And I, for one, would like to live in that town.

Verdict: Think Book of Mormon meets Hedwig at a Dolly Parton drag brunch, and you’re halfway there. Joyously subversive, politically delicious, and gloriously extra.