The Brooklyn Rail

Marla Mindelle’s mother was sure she knew me from somewhere. It was just before a preview performance at the Orpheum Theatre of The Big Gay Jamboree, the new off-Broadway musical for which Mindelle serves as co-composer, co-lyricist, co-book writer, and star.

The woman in a floral top holding a poster with her daughter’s face on it told me I looked familiar and asked, “Do I know you from Titanic?” (She didn’t.) When Mindelle heard this story later, she lamented, “She can’t even pronounce my second musical’s name properly. Jesus Christ.”

The actual name of that mispronounced musical is Titanique, a surprise runaway hit currently two years into its run at the Daryl Roth Theatre off-Broadway with productions launching in Toronto, London, Chicago, and Sydney. Mindelle co-wrote that one too, also starring in the original cast as Celine Dion, whose song catalogue and “kooky crazy” perspective reanimate the 1997 film through a queer lens.

I knew the couple behind me at The Big Gay Jamboree was Mindelle’s parents, Stephen and Ryta Weiner, because I overheard them telling someone (that they actually did know) that they were surprising their daughter and hadn’t realized they’d be quite so visible from the stage. Mindelle hates knowing who’s in the audience during a show. “They’re like, ‘We’re not gonna tell Marla, we’re not gonna tell Marla,’ and then they’re like five rows back,” she said. “At least hide yourself in the mezzanine.”

Roasting her mother comes naturally to Mindelle, who explained, “my family’s love language is trolling and teasing and making fun.” Humor was the “backbone” of her home life growing up with her two sisters in Yardley, Pennsylvania: even when the Weiners fought, she would hear them eventually erupt into laughter.

Mindelle’s father is himself a musical theater composer; his most recent off-Broadway score was Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written at the York Theater in 2022. He introduced her to records of more obscure musicals like Zorba and Irma La Douce when she was three years old, taking her on frequent trips to New York where she saw The Secret Garden, The Most Happy Fella, and Big River early on. Mindelle would fall asleep each night listening to him composing at the piano. “If it wasn’t for my father, who is still pursuing his dream,” she said, “I don’t know what I would do for a living.”

So it was fortunate that, when she left for the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) from which she graduated in 2006, she quickly identified a trio of new trolling soulmates. In CCM’s musical theater program, Mindelle found herself in a “musical theater factory, like a gay factory that just ships out musical theater army men and puts us in Broadway shows.” The cutthroat program required students to reaudition repeatedly in their first two years to remain enrolled, pitting classmate against classmate.

But Mindelle located three likeminded compatriots—Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Connor Gallagher, and Philip Drennen—all of whom, as Gallagher put it, “always had one eyebrow raised on the whole process.” Faculty referred to Mindelle, Parks-Ramage, and Drennen as the “Unholy Trinity” so they rechristened themselves UTPO (Unholy Trinity Plus One) to include Gallagher.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and UTPO remains inseparable: on The Big Gay Jamboree, Parks-Ramage co-wrote the book, Drennen co-composed the score, and Gallagher directed and choreographed. “If you told Marla at that point, you’re going to be creating and writing something that’s going to be a hit in 2024,” Drennen said, thinking back to their college days, “she’d probably say, ‘Yeah, that sounds right.’”

And The Big Gay Jamboree, which opened on October 6, amalgamates both the manic musical theater intensity of the collaborators’ college days and the education in musical history that Mindelle received from her father. In the show, a would-be Broadway star Stacey arises from a blackout night to find herself trapped in the middle of a Golden Age musical. (“I mixed fireball and beer / Then chipped my front veneer / And threw up in a van,” Mindelle sings as Stacey in the opening number, “But have I died and woke inside this bullshit Music Man?”)

The script abounds with Real Housewives homages, an extended tribute to Jennifer Lopez’s varied career, and myriad musical references, like a “Do Re Mi” send-up that introduces the closeted 1940s characters to a contemporary lexicon. (“Now you know your Gay B-Cs / Off you go to to find some Ds!”)

It’s a sensibility the Weiners, who have weighed in on every draft and attended every reading, can appreciate, especially since Mindelle has ensured her mother has now seen every season of Drag Race. “I have changed my Boomer parents,” she said. “They have become little queer aficionados.”

Mindelle and Parks-Ramage began working together on The Big Gay Jamboree as a film script in 2016. (Mindelle’s father even collaborated on the first two songs she wrote, lending his mid-century musical expertise.) LuckyChap Entertainment, Margot Robbie’s production company, took on the project, but the film “died in development hell at Paramount,” Parks-Ramage said.

By the time Titanique began performances in New York in 2022, Parks-Ramage and Mindelle had decided to work with Drennen to adapt the idea into a stage musical. Robbie then happened to see Titanique and emailed Mindelle afterwards to express renewed interest in collaborating: “Marla was like, ‘Oh my god, TWIST!’” Parks-Ramage said.

With LuckyChap back on board to produce a stage version of The Big Gay Jamboree, Mindelle and Drennen churned out the full score in four months, completing it last summer, shortly after Mindelle departed from the cast of Titanique. “No one tells you what it’s like to give your show away, and I was really grieving,” she said. “Big Gay Jamboree became my catharsis.”

The quartet talks earnestly about twenty years of camaraderie and how a shared history can generate material incredibly quickly. “We just have a shorthand with each other, so we could speak each other’s languages,” Drennen said.

They’re equally at home lampooning each other. Parks-Ramage was eager to share some of Mindelle’s college nicknames: Patti Newscaster is one (“when she first showed up to CCM, she had this blowout that she would do every day and she looked like she was going to tell you the weather, honey”). Marla Scissorhands is another (“because if you pissed her off in college, she would just cut you out”). Freshman year, Mindelle pantsed Parks-Ramage and, after he “revenge-pantsed” her in a rehearsal, she refused to speak to him for a week. Gallagher separately related that during an argument while Mindelle was writing the Senior Showcase script that he was to direct, he told her, “You’re not Tennessee Williams,” so she Marla Scissorhandsed him for a fortnight.

Her final college nickname, her collaborators explained, was “A Man of Principle.” Even as an undergrad, when standing up for something she believed was right, Mindelle refused to back down. “She was a little scary in college, I’ll be honest,” Gallagher said.

“I don’t get angry or upset at anything unless it’s completely unjust,” Mindelle responded, “and I’m so mortified that they have told you my deepest character flaws, that I’m a Scissorhands and a principle-based gal.” But in typical UTPO-trolling fashion, Mindelle made sure to give as good as she got, sharing that the group calls Parks-Ramage “Jonathan Parks-Trash Chute.” Although a vegetarian, “he was a gay raccoon in his former life. I’ve never seen somebody eat like they’re eating out of a dumpster like Jonathan Parks-Ramage.”

The foursome has a kinder nickname for Marla’s mother, whom the men said treats them like her own sons. In the early 2000s, Ryta began posting on BroadwayWorld as mommy3, and, Mindelle said, “What homosexual was reading those chat boards every single day in college but Jonathan Parks-Ramage?” After mommy3 started a thread heralding Mindelle’s burgeoning talent, Parks-Ramage took notice. Mindelle confronted her mother, expecting an embarrassed confession. Instead, she told her, “Yeah, I am mommy3—you need hype going into this business.” The nickname mommy3 stuck (Stephen is, thusly, Daddy4), and “that’ll be on her tombstone.”

Before her breakthrough with Titanique, Mindelle, buoyed perhaps by the hype generated by mommy3, landed roles in Sister Act and Cinderella on Broadway, but she contended that “the greatest work of my life to this day” is her semi-viral performance of “Colors of the Wind.” Her bizarre rendition originated on a UTPO trip to Disney World right after Hurricane Katrina; the parks were empty so, Mindelle said, “we just got high and drunk every single day.” One night, the group stumbled upon Pleasure Island’s karaoke studio and Mindelle’s friends encouraged her to make a recording in a “batshit crazy” voice she was developing. “She went in high as balls and came out with the best performance of ‘Colors of the Wind’ in history,” Parks-Ramage said.

The one-take oddity somehow began to spread through emailed audio files and burned CDs. After graduation, when Gallagher was performing in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, he invited Mindelle to perform a fully-staged version of the number that he choreographed for a Broadway Cares benefit. Video of that performance became “immortalized in niche gay musical theater YouTube fame,” Parks-Ramage said.

And Mindelle’s community of trolls is only growing. Parks-Ramage described the company of The Big Gay Jamboree as “a family of crazy, misfit clowns” where “no one fits into a mold,” just like the woman who leads them. In this zany world Mindelle has co-created, “they just get to thrive as the deranged clowns they are.”

Mindelle hasn’t stopped trolling her parents either. Outside the theater following that preview performance, I saw Mindelle greet the Weiners with a warm embrace and a cry of “I saw you guys, you losers!” I asked her if she was okay with my describing this stage door reunion between parents and daughter. “Please quote me,” she said. “I would love them to know through a publication how big of losers they are.”