ART BATTLE

Will Dustin Lance Black’s Prop 8 Play Beat The Prop 8 Musical Or Films?

Academy Award-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black wasn’t so pleased with the Supreme Court blocking the broadcast of the Prop 8 trial. So he sat in the courtroom, watched the trial, interviewed people on both sides, and created a 90-minute play presenting the trial’s best arguments verbatim. The play, called 8, will get a September reading on Broadway and eventually a stage production at Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and every other college everywhere (maybe it will even replace Terrance McNally’s Corpus Christi as the most protested school play of all time!)

But even though 8 will portray a dozen people from the actual Prop 8 trial—like pro-gay lawyers Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, their opponent Charles J. Cooper, the plaintiff’s lesbian couple, and the Silver Fox Judge Vaughn R. Walker—can the play ever hope to top the YouTube Prop 8 re-enactments, Funny Or Die’s “Prop 8-The Musical” or the documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition?

Not unless it follows our formula for success…

8: The Mormon Proposition definitely pulled at our disenfranchised heartstrings with scenes of weepy gays and angry protestors—so injecting in some emotional dramatics is an absolute must. Especially when you consider that theYouTube re-enactments taken verbatim from the actual trial were drop-dead boring. So how do you sex up a boring civil case?

“Prop 8-The Musical” has a clue. It featured Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, and other famous celebrities, an easy-to-understand plot, and songs! Lots of glorious SONGS!!! So Black better scrounge up some A-list stage actors and throw in at least one Solid Gold dance sequence if he wants 8 to go viral and become the next Off-Broadway sleeper hit.

Do we smell a Tony in Black’s future?

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