Image: AngusMcIndoe.com
Last night was the fifth-anniversary celebration for Angus McIndoe’s, the theater-district hot spot popular before shows with tourists and after shows with actors and critics, and the party drew what one wag identified as the five sectors of the theatergoing population: gays, Jews, gay Jews, the WASPs who write about them, and the women who love them all. Much of the talk was about Spring Awakening, the exhilarating rock musical that opened Sunday night to amazing reviews in yesterday’s papers, and if you’re wondering why the show — about sexual discovery and repression among nineteenth-century teenagers — has struck such a chord with theater critics and reporters, you need only step into their world for a night to learn that this crowd knows more than a little about sexual frustration.
As soon as the room had cleared of the requisite (theater) celebrities — fellow Irishmen Brian O’Byrne and Frank McCourt; Matthew Broderick, a regular at Angus since his Producers days — conversation quickly turned to the difficulties of getting laid in this biz. (Though, of course, no one was taking much action at the party to rectify that.) There was angry talk of the blue-haired matinee ladies and young children who would likely bring randy Spring Awakening down. There was ogling of the tiny black-T-shirted waiters and virile, blond-haired Scotsman Angus, depending on your preference. Gossip ran rampant about a certain gossip writer who’d made the smart career move of courting the hard-up women working backstage. Someone was overheard saying “and you wouldn’t even let me fuck you in the cab on the way over here!”
As the evening progressed past midnight, conversation degenerated into a story about a comic who had stuck a microphone very near or perhaps in a heckler’s rectum at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as a scatological riff on the 40 pounds of “tarry stool” — yes, that refers to what you think it does — found in John Wayne’s body after he died. Everyone groaned at the image, then discussed a good porn name for the feces in question. (Did we mention there were several open bars?) The winner was “Tahri Stühl.” And we can’t imagine why these guys aren’t getting any. —Jada Yuan
