The Boyfriend

In 7th grade I was in the school musical production of Sandy Wilson’s, “The Boy Friend,” a 1950’s musical that parodied 1920’s musicals and was about a group of English girls who summer in the south of France and who are all looking for boyfriends. I remembered the music well, and for the next 20 years the musical lived with me off and on as an earworm, sometimes for months. I thought it would be fun to stage my own production, maybe remake it as a movie. But those ambitions required people, money and a certain kind of collaborative energy that I didn’t feel I had in me. Instead I recreated the musical at home, alone, in my living room.

The Boyfriend is a twelve-video series that takes each song from the musical and uses the lyrics to tell deeply personal stories about the ways love, loss and desire intersect with our public politics. I began making these videos in October 2016 and finally finished the last one in April 2020. It’s been an interesting four years. The play is all here. Many thanks to the treasure trove of YouTube videos of “The Boy Friend” performed in high schools all across America. These young performers helped me learn all the songs, and also some dance moves.

Rachel Garber Cole

Rachel Garber Cole is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who works across performance, video, sculpture, text and sound. Her projects are rooted in language and the performative body and externalize the intimate experiences of shame and anxiety. Within this context, Rachel's work explores the ways personal vulnerabilities and intimacies are affected and disturbed by social institutions and structures, particularly around issues of gender and climate crisis. Find more of her work at www.rachelgarbercole.com.