Matt and I saw the first preview performance of The Ritz on Saturday night. This is a revival of a 1975 Terrence McNally farce about a member of a mob family who winds up hiding out in a gay bathhouse to escape a hit on his life.

I didn’t care for the show. In fact, parts of it really irritated me. I don’t know who decided that a revival of a dated 30-year-old play with jokes about “chubby chasers” was a good idea. The apex of my irritation occurred late in the second act when the show seemed close to the end but wound up going on for another 10-15 minutes. The show wasn’t all bad — I thought Brooks Ashmanskas (as a flamboyant bathhouse patron) and Rosie Perez (as an aspiring songstress) were particularly good, and there’s a funny sendup of Pippin in the second act. But overall I was disappointed.

Better entertainment came from the elderly couple sitting next to me. I felt bad for them because they seemed confused about what was happening on stage and didn’t seem to get most of the jokes. During the intermission I heard the husband trying to explain to the wife what a gay bathhouse was. “It’s like a spa for gay people,” he said.

Then I heard them conferring quietly about something. A minute later, the husband turned to me with his Playbill opened to the cast photos. He pointed to the photo of Brooks Ashmanskas. “Which one is he?” he asked me.

I pointed to the part of the stage where Ashmanskas’s character’s bathhouse room was located. “He’s the one who uses that room,” I said.

“Oh… the gay?” he said to me.

Um…

“They’re all gay,” I said.

“Well, the prominent gay.”

“Yeah.”

I turned back to Matt.

“You know you have to blog about this,” Matt said.

And thus…