Each month, Micah Bucey and Nicholas Williams present The Gay Agenda, a deliciously bizarre and irreverent quasi-cabaret-cum-performance-art piece that follows in the footsteps of Bucey’s The Only Thing Straight is my Jacket and Fitz and Walloughs Get It in the End. (This show immediately sets itself apart from most cabarets by offering the audience homemade cookies as they take their seats.) Before the show goes on break for the summer, BroadwayWorld chatted briefly with Bucey about creating The Gay Agenda and his other unique pieces.
How did you develop The Gay Agenda?
Way back in the fall of 2007, a mutual musician friend introduced Nicholas and Micah at one of her concerts, saying, “You two should write songs together.” So…a few weeks later, we wrote our first one, about a one-night stand. Then, we wrote more songs. Within nine months, we had our very own great big show running monthly at The Players Loft.
What inspired it?
We love musical theatre. We also love the ridiculous nature and bombast of musical theatre. We wanted to create love letter in which we could express our deep love for the form while lampooning its more laughable qualities.
What inspired the cookies?
The characters we play are really just extended versions of our own personalities. Micah is the cracked-out-diva and Nicholas is the wan, sweet pianist/crooner. We felt that these characters would want to cover all of their bases in terms of winning over the audience, thus the cookies offer something that will at least satisfy an audience member’s sweet tooth immediately. We also just really like baking and eating cookies.
How would you describe your work? Cabaret? Performance Art? Something unique?
I like to call it anti-cabaret. Not that it’s against cabaret. Not at all. But we try to invert expectations, so that, even if you’re not a fan of the artform or a fan of us, you can still walk away saying, “Oh, my God. That was insane.” Cabaret is an incredibly open-hearted yet self-indulgent form. We like to be a little more self-aware of our indulgences and allow them to make some fun for us and the audience.
How do you develop your other shows and characters? What inspired them?
I’ve never called myself a singer. I think I’m just a seller of songs and stories. Nicholas is a first-class musician who reigns in the musicality a bit so that we’re offering a legitimate product, albeit with some manic storytelling intertwined.
We’re inspired by all performers, the best and the worst. There’s something so beautiful about a “bad” performance.
What do you hope people get from your shows?
I hope that they laugh and tap their feet and walk out thinking that they could make their own show, too. We all can. People just like telling us that we’re not good enough.
What are you working on next?
We’ll be continuing to write new material for The Gay Agenda and, at the behest of our agent, we are developing a new musical based on a cult classic indie film that we probably shouldn’t tell you about next. But you’ll be first to know when we can. Seriously.
