Fringe review: ‘I’m Just Not That Gay’

I’m Just Not That Gay!, Christopher Leavy, Winter Park. Red venue, 55 minutes, $10. (Discounts: Code on Facebook.)

By Elizabeth Maupin
Elizabeth Maupin on Theater

Christopher Leavy

If you’ve spent any time at all listening to Central Florida musical theater, you’re surely used to seeing and hearing Chris Leavy, who’s musical director at Winter Park Playhouse and has accompanied any number of cabaret shows at Mad Cow and elsewhere.

So you may be surprised to see (and hear!) Leavy take the spotlight for himself in I’m Just Not That Gay, a clever little revue based on the premise that, although Leavy is indeed gay and he and his partner are celebrating 20 years together, he’s so not into a lot of the gay stereotype that he feels he just doesn’t fit in. The exception, of course, is musical theater, which Leavy is into big-time, and which he delivers with flair.

(One other exception: Leavy had a boyhood crush on Kitty Carlisle Hart. Enough said.)

Anyway, he’s put together a bunch of musical-theater songs, most of them largely unfamiliar and most of them funny — the witty retort to the cabaret favorite “Taylor, the Latte Boy,” a double-entendre-laced song (about the towns of Massachusetts) called “Entering Marion.”

Highlights for me: New lyrics to the La Cage aux Folles favorite “A Little More Mascara,” and the gorgeous love song “Sailing,” from William Finn’s A New Brain, which I could listen to again and again.

And, of course, the joy of seeing and hearing a man who’s comfortable in his own skin, doing the thing that gives him joy, the thing he loves the best.

Remaining shows:
Tuesday May 24, 7:10 p.m.
Thursday May 26, 8:10 p.m.
Friday May 27, 10:20 p.m.
Sunday May 29, 6:30 p.m.