Arts & Entertainment
Show Tunes and Young Love
Young Love
Review by Roland Palmer
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If you listen to cast albums and can sing lyrics from Dreamgirls from memory, then you’ve got Broadway Damage. Writer, director, and editor Victor Mignatti’s first feature film helps us to recall a time filled with optimism, romance, and dreams. We join friends Marc, Cynthia, and Robert fresh out of NYU as they move to Greenwich Village to take their bites of the Big Apple.
The first order of business is, of course, to find an apartment. And what’s the best way to find an apartment in NY? By checking out the obituaries, of course. Marc and Robert, following leads from the obits, check out apartments via the fire escape (who needs a realtor?), and find the perfect place. When the “hunky” overall-clad landlord catches them in the apartment, Marc does some intimate one-on-one negotiating – the details of which are not shared – and manages to land the apartment.
Marc (Michael Shawn Lucas) and Robert (Aaron Williams) are best friends who share a love of Broadway musicals. Robert dreams of writing Broadway’s next big musical and settling down with Marc; Marc dreams of a successful acting career and finding a perfect boyfriend who’s a perfect 10 – that is, someone other than Robert. Cynthia (Mara Hobel) dreams of shopping and landing a job with New Yorker editor Tina Brown. Add to the mix the handsome pop-star-wannabe-next-door, David (Hugh Panaro), who catches every eye – including Marc’s – and you have some interesting dynamics. It is only a matter of time before everyone’s expectations start to unravel and life begins.
Robert cannot seem to get Marc’s romantic attention, or anyone else’s for that matter, though he tries. Marc and David, of course, become a hot item but David’s not-so-pure past soon reveals itself (beware large keyrings!). Cynthia works daily to infiltrate the New Yorker in her quest for a job with Tina Brown, and ends up attracting the attention of the FBI. Through it all, these friends find solace in each other, and of course there is a happy ending.
Lucas is a relative newcomer who almost never stops smiling throughout the film – and what a smile! Williams does a great job of portraying the geeky gay guy who just wants his best friend to see him as more than a friend; the scenes in which Robert tries to hit on the clerk in a gift shop are wonderfully done. But it is Hobel who steals her every scene. She constantly recreates herself, with the help of Daddy and Mommy’s credit cards, in over-the-top outfits, and gives the entire film its sense of humor and generous doses of “campiness”. You may recognize Hobel from her role on Roseanne or as young Christina Crawford in the film Mommie Dearest.
“If you’re 17 and you see this movie, I want you to beg your parents to let you go to NYU and live in the Village,” Mignatti told interviewer Dennis Hensley. “If you’re 40 and you see this movie, I want you to remember what it’s like to fall in love for the first time – or just go out and fall in love for the first time. I want audiences to know that it’s safe to go to the romance place and to experience that innocent joy, that silliness. It’s okay to live life from an optimistic Technicolor sort of perspective.”
I got that, and so will you once you see this charming and fun movie, winner of the 1997 LA Outfest.
Roland F. Palmer lives in Hinesburg.
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Broadway Damage Written and directed by Victor Mignatti
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