Bawdy and Beautiful: Dancers Over 40 Celebrates Lee Roy Reams
At Dancers Over 40's 54 Below Gala, Lee Roy Reams Gets Roasted (and Loves It)
While Broadway is usually dark on Mondays, yesterday I attended a show on the Great White Way that featured some jokes as raunchy as any bit you’d hear in a late night bit at the Comedy Cellar, and yet was as warm-hearted and generous as a birthday party.
The occasion was Dancers Over 40’s gala at 54 Below honoring Broadway star and gay icon Lee Roy Reams. Over more than 60 years as a professional performer, Reams has performed alongside the likes of Gwen Verdon (Sweet Charity), Carol Channing (Hello, Dolly!, Lorelei), and Lauren Bacall (Applause); been celebrated for performances like Roger deBris in Mel Brooks’ 2006 The Producers; and nominated for a Tony over 25 years earlier for his incredible song and dance work in 42nd Street.
Check him out here at the 1980 Tonys, performing with the cast of 42nd Street starting at about 2:30. His tap work is effortless and absolutely infectious. And he and co-star Wanda Reichert just do not quit. It’s astonishing.
Over the years Reams also directed Carol Channing in a Broadway revival of Hello Dolly! and directed Chita Rivera in the 2000 Paper Mill Playhouse revival of Anything Goes (among many other things). Closest to my own heart, Reams was supposed to be the next Albin in the Broadway production of La Cage Aux Folles when instead of moving theaters the show suddenly closed.
He went on to do the role at Paper Mill the following year. The New York Times called it “an overdue casting coup” and a “performance with irresistible brio.” Those are great notes anytime. But when the show you’re in has just finished five years nearby on Broadway, and your role won George Hearn a Tony, they’re almost inconceivable.
Now to be clear, the bar for naughtiness on Broadway at this point is not exactly high. Even as what seems like three dozen new shows have opened since yesterday, nowhere (except the amazing current off-Broadway show Teeth) can you find a story like A Strange Loop or Torch Song Trilogy that considers sex or sexuality in a revelatory, playful or transgressive way. Hell, Eden Espinosa and Amber Iman’s affair in Lempicka is so domestic you’d think they had spent the last 50 years living in Provincetown rather than risking their lives as lesbian lovers in early 20th century France.
Meanwhile the packed-house roast of Reams—or as host Jim Brochu called it, “a light air frying”—included jokes about going down on Tallulah Bankhead; the size of Frank Sinatra’s dick; happy endings; Kitty Carlyle Hart’s first kiss; the Sermon on the Mount; and Reams’ ass.
When Melissa Errico, who sang “How Are Things in Glocca Morra,” a song Reams had introduced her to over 25 years ago, noted “It was written to be a song for peace. Now, peace isn’t the first thing we think about when we think about Lee Roy”— Reams shouted back, “P-I-E-C-E.” Brochu later announced Reams was going to be in the new edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. “Yes in the new edition, we will see Socrates saying ‘True wisdom is knowing that we know nothing.’ And now Lee Roy Reams: ‘How big is his dick?’”
It’s interesting, too: The night began with a video clip from Nathan Lane, who admitted he “is a little gunshy” when it comes to doing roasts. “I was once reluctantly talked into doing a roast for Jerry Lewis,” he said. “Because he was a childhood idol of mine I said yes, but I worried about it.” At the roast he immediately discovered that his first joke, about Jerry’s health, was absolutely not going to work—“Jerry looked terrible, he was bloated and pale and very sweaty.” (Lewis had a heart attack on his plane after the roast, in fact.)
Lane was also unprepared for what it meant to sit on the dias as one of the roasters. “I had forgotten that if you’re on the dais, you, too, are also roasted. And so I had to sit through ten comedians getting up and basically saying I was a big fag. It was not a fun afternoon.”
Times have thankfully changed. Last night was anything but a chance for people to get away with saying shitty things about a gay man. Reams was escorted to his seat by two hot young men with next to nothing on, and as he sat in the corner in a great black shirt with white polka dots, he and the audience alike basked in just how at home in himself he was.
At one point Mary Callanan, who did a raunchy musical theater-meets-Johnny Carson Carnac bit with 54 Below mainstay Robert W. Schneider, quipped “‘Hurry back, hurry back’—“Name something that Disney Theatricals never said to Lee Roy Reams.” (Reams was Lumière in the original 1994 animated film Beauty and the Beast.) And Reams roared.
Mary Callanan and Robert W. Schneider channel their inner Carson.
At the top of the show Brochu said he’d been hired because “no one in the Broadway community wanted to say anything bad about you, Lee Roy.” And the love for Reams was on full display, as luminaries like Melissa Errico, Judy Kaye, Penny Fuller, and Billy Stritch each took the stage. “Thank you for noticing me,” Kaye said before singing George Gershwin’s “(Our) Love is Here to Stay.” “Thank you for supporting me, thank you every time you have given me a suggestion or a thought for a show I should do.”
Billy Stritch plays Cy Coleman’s “Nothing to Do But Dance,” a song Reams had long been asking him to learn.
Penny Fuller delivers her showstopper “One Hallowe’en” from Applause, which she opened with Reams.
After sharing a hilarious story of Reams trying to comfort a very anxious Lauren Bacall at the gypsy run through of Applause by saying, “Why are you so nervous? It all depends on you,” Melissa Errico told him, “You really do steady so many of us in the business. You lead the way. I was very young when I met you and you really showed me that it can be a really decent and playful and wonderful profession.”
Late in the show Brochu introduced actress Pamela Myers, who’s known Reams since 1968, having met him when she was a theater student in college. He directed her in some summer shows, and they became friends.
Decades later the two of them were asked to do a concert with the Cincinnati Pops. As the concert approached, her mother died. As a result, the two of them didn’t have much time to rehearse. “Lee Roy, bless his heart, he came out to the little church, and we rehearsed at my mom’s funeral,” she told the crowd. “We sang ‘People will Say We’re in Love,’ which is pretty funny,” she noted. “ And my mother, I’m sure she was just loving it.”
At the end of the evening Reams got up and performed a medley of songs dedicated to his fellow cast members from 42nd Street, a whole hoof of whom came to the event. I’d never seen Reams perform in person before, and I have to say, the thing that was most notable was the warmth and playfulness Reams exudes. From his eyes to his feet, Lee Roy Reams sparkles. And he makes the world around him somehow sparkle, too.
Actor Richard Kind said it best, in a video message for the event. Dame Diana Rigg, he had heard, had told the director when Reams auditioned for the musical Colette, “I cannot have a leading man who is prettier than I am.”
“You make everything prettier,” said Kind of Reams. “When you sing, it’s pretty. When you dance, it’s pretty. When you are around a table, you are pretty. You make the world prettier, and I thank you for that.”
In ancient Hebrew there’s a word, zkr. It gets translated today as related to memory or remembering, but in context it didn’t refer to a mental act so much as a dramatic one. To remember something from the past was to bring it back into existence. The moments that have passed are never truly gone. Rather they wait for us to recall them so that they may live again and affect us in the present.
Dancers Over 40 is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Currently led by John Sefakis each year the organization does a gala like this. It’s meant to celebrate its members, and also to raise money, so that it may be able to continue to support and advocate for older dancers. (Pitch in here.)
But last night with the help of Lee Roy Reams and friends, they also gave a whole era of the theater a chance to unfurl and flower once again.
And it really was so pretty.
