Photo: @thegingerb3ardmen
By Steve Desroches
It’s morning in America. The sun is rising over a quintessential farm with a red barn and a galloping horse weathervane. The fields are full of crops as the animals roam the paddocks or stir in their coops. Just then, a rooster shakes his tail feathers as the dew of daybreak begins to hiss and steam in the sun of a new day. He throws his head back, opens his beak, but instead of a cock-a-doodle doo he breaks out into a showtune complete with choreography. This isn’t just any farm, its Fairweather Farm, and here there’s a little tinsel in the hay and glitter in the feed as it’s home to an LGBTQ menagerie of animals that have a penchant to kick-ball-change out of the stable and shimmy with their jazz hands, er, wings and hooves.
This idyllic, queer, agrarian home is the creation of Blake Allen and Kristian Seeber (perhaps better known as Tina Burner) friends and colleagues who have been hard at work over the past several years writing the stage comedy Farmyard Follies: The Moosical. And Provincetown is going to get a first ever glimpse of this new work of musical theater on Friday, September 22 with a special staging at the Crown and Anchor.
“It’s much like Provincetown, Fairweather Farm,” says Allen. “Here you lead with love, and as long as you lead with love and acceptance here, you’re accepted.”
The story within Farmyard Follies is of a gay utopia that is turned on its tail when darkness and chaos befall this perfect queer enclave and turn the pleasant daily farm life into an LGBTQ-whodunit. The 11 animals that make up the cast of characters include not only a gay rooster, but a non-binary cow and chicken who stands up for herself as she’s more than just her breast. And there’s a goat and sheep, too, but no swan. Allen made a pitch for a swan, but Seeber said no. That was just a little too much. The two laugh while sitting in high back chairs in the Library, a cozy meeting room with a balcony overlooking Commercial Street at the Crown. Seeber lays it out there. Yes, this show is stupid, but the kind of stupid that is best kind of stupid. Theater in general asks audiences to suspend their disbelief, and that allows one to be transported to the barricades of the June Rebellion in Les Misérables or to outside the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires as Eva Peron throws her arms in the air addressing her legions of descamisados. But when we are presented with something completely absurd, like a farm full of LGBTQ animals, there’s a sweet spot in there says Seeber. It opens up a world of infinite possibilities and can lovingly disarm an audience so that within the comedic framework of the story the writers, in this case Allen and Seeber, can address real issues of the day, which is their intention with Farmyard Follies.
“If you can laugh at something then you can talk about it,” says Seeber. “Through laughter or tears is often when you can really talk about something.”
Seeber, as Tina Burner, is of course known for his appearance on season 13 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Allen is an accomplished composer and musician working on Broadway as well as in a variety of other projects in New York City. But the two are becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of Provincetown, with Allen working here for short stints over the past eight years and Seeber making his debut last summer. This season the two presented the hit show 5, 6 and Several 8’s at the Crown, in which they lampooned the status of Broadway clogged with stale revivals and uninspired juke box musicals. But they note with original musicals like Kimberly Akimbo winning the Tony Award for Best Musical and Shucked, a show about corn, it just might be the perfect timing for Farmyard Follies to hit the Great White Way, which is their goal.
“I’m very organized and document everything,” says Blake. “I can just see it now on opening night in the program where it says ‘first performed in Provincetown at the Crown and Anchor September 22, 2023.’”
Farmyard Follies: The Moosical is at the Crown and Anchor, 247 Commercial St., on Friday, September 22 at 9 p.m. Tickets ($50/$75) are available at the box office and online at onlyatthecrown.com. For more information call 508.487.1430.
