THE Ben Platt grew up in musical theater. At six, he wore a sparkly jacket to a school performance of “Cinderella.” At 32, he has already won a Tony, is forever associated with Dear Evan Hansen and belongs to that generation of actors who grew up in front of an audience, between the stage, the cinema and the Internet.
And yet, until now, she hadn’t played a fully-fledged queer character who openly sings love songs to a man on stage.
This changes to Midnight at the Never Get, the musical rising to Menier Chocolate Factory of London and transports the audience to a pillegal Greenwich Village gay bar in 1965. Platt plays Trevor, a cabaret singer in a space where love, stage and queer survival meet before the movement’s big public explosion.
He says there is something liberating about the experience. Having spent years in musicals, he had never been in this position: playing a three-dimensional queer character and singing songs that don’t need to translate or hide the object of their desire.
Midnight at the Never Get is not presented as a straightforward political manifesto. But it cannot be read politically, especially at a time when Plath speaks of America as a place that seems to him “helpless and terrifying”. The transfer to a 60s Greenwich Village gay bar brings with it a whole story: hidden spaces, songs that say things not allowed elsewhere, bodies that learn to exist in the night.
For Platt, the stage has always been a safe space, but also a place of anxiety. He opens up about his anxiety, how his relationship with actor husband Noah Galvin helps him manage it, and how creative concentration acts as a counterweight. This time he’s in London with two constants: his man and a role that brings him closer to something he’s never done on stage.
Platt rose to international fame with Dear Evan Hansen, playing a troubled teenage hero from the play’s early development to Broadway. The show took him off, but absorbed him almost completely. He has said that for years he put his own life on hold, living inside the character. The 2021 film adaptation was a more difficult experience: he himself was heavily criticized for being too old for the role and for taking advantage of his father’s position as a producer. Platt describes it as a painful but unavoidable lesson of the job.
Today, he seems to be looking away. Not only to Midnight at the Never Get, but also to one of the strangest cinematic ventures of the next few decades: Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along.
The film is based on the Stephen Sondheim musical, which follows three friends back in time, from the ravages of middle age back to their original youthful optimism. Linklater, instead of shooting the story with makeup or digital transformations, shoots it in real time. If three years pass between two scenes in the story, the crew waits three actual years to continue.
Platt says filming is about a third done. The film is expected to be completed in 2038, when he will be 45 years old. He describes it as something “absolutely crazy” but also like a family reunion that happens every few years. He stars alongside Paul Meskal and Benny Feldstein.
The paradox is fascinating: an actor currently playing a queer singer in the 60s in London is simultaneously involved in a film that will record his own real aging until 2038. The scene gives him a love that can be spoken openly now. Cinema asks him to wait twenty years to complete a story about time.
Platt also talks about him Sondheim almost like a spirit guide. He calls him, in his own way, rabbi and imam of. His dream role is George in Sunday in the Park With George, a play about art, obsession, loneliness and the price of living inside your head. Like every gay man in the world, he also jokes, he hopes to one day star in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
For now, though, she’s in a fictional Greenwich Village gay bar, singing unreservedly man-gazing songs. For a performer who grew up in the most queer-coded genre of the American scene, this sounds almost self-evident. The fact that it wasn’t obvious until now is exactly what’s interesting.
Source: Lifo
