Boy Meets Boy

About the show

Boy Meets Boy is a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Bill Solly, as well as a book by Bill Solly and Donald Ward. Edith O'Hara and Jim Payne originally produced the show in February 1975, at the13th Street Theatre, New York City. After a seven-month run, O'Hara and Payne moved the show off-Broadway to the Actor's Playhouse, opening on Sept. 17, 1975 in association with Christopher Larkin and Lee Barton. The show is a fast-paced, light-hearted musical comedy, featuring a 1930s-style Astaire/Rogers romance between two men, and a same-sex marriage. The world of the play posits that in 1936, same-sex relationships are considered as normal as heterosexual ones. The play begins against the background of the abdication of Edward VIII and ends with the Duke of Windsor's (and the protagonists') June 1937 weddings. This is appropriate, as one of the major themes is "Giving It Up for Love." The action occurs in the Savoy Hotel, a few elegant nightspots in London, a bar in Spain, and a black-sheep aunt's disreputable establishment in Paris. The original New York cast included David Gallegly as Guy Rose, Joe Barrett as Casey O’Brien and Raymond Wood as Clarence Cutler. Edith O'Hare and Jim Payne took the show and most of the cast to the Las Palmas Theatre in Los Angeles, as well as to the Chi Chi Club in San Francisco, in 1976. The show had its London premiere in December 2012. There, the cast included Olivier Award winner Stephen Ashfield as Casey O'Brien with Johnjo Flynn as Guy Rose and Ben Kavanagh as Clarence Cutler.