Homocore to the core – Chicago Reader

Kevin Sparrow’s new pop-punk musical, Sofa King Queer, is raw, shaggy, sardonic, passionate, and just right for this moment. Directed by JD Caudill and featuring a young and diverse queer cast, this production by Nothing Without a Company hits a lot of the right emotional notes as it follows a group of queer friends, lovers, and family members through one day’s couplings, quarrels, and revelations.

Sofa King Queer
Through 12/14: Thu–Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 11/13 7 PM and Mon 12/2 7 PM (industry night), no show Sat 11/16 2 PM or Thu 11/28;  Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan, nothingwithoutacompany.org, $30-$60

Topher (Jacob C. Watson) is a booker and manager at a rock club who lives in the venue’s basement studio. When we first meet him, he’s in bed with Granger (Marquise De’Jahn), a promoter. Topher’s former lover, a closeted Mormon boy named Brody (Aaron Cappello), is set to do a “secret show” at the club with his on-the-cusp-of-stardom band, the False Senses. Topher’s mixed feelings about both Brody and Granger as lovers also reflect his mixed feelings about taking the club in a more openly queer direction, as Granger urges.

Set in 2008 before the election of Barack Obama, the show, as Caudill notes in the program, is intended as a period piece. But the urgency of queer people claiming their space and naming their pain has never felt more important than right now, which isn’t to say that Sparrow’s show is pure conscious uplift (though a few speeches do come within hailing distance of feeling a tad didactic). It’s unafraid of the messiness and conflicts within the queer community and how much harder it can be to build trust after a lifetime of abuse both within and outside your family, depicted in part here by the story of Topher’s agoraphobic cousin, Sil (played with compelling vulnerability by Amy Delgado), and their partner Nao (Alexandra Alontaga).

Songs like “Backroom Boy/Backroom Girl,” “Daddy Dearest,” and the title track (say it fast if you don’t get the joke right away) are absolute bangers, performed by an onstage four-piece band under music director and arranger Ron Attreau (there’s an album coming out!). Both as a period piece about late-aughts homocore culture in Chicago and as a rousing cri de coeur for right now, this big-hearted show deserves an attentive audience.