Bagaglino’s Oh Gay!

A homosexual show that doesn’t live up to its title

Abstract

In 1979 the Italian theatrical production offered plenty of plays centred upon gay themes, whilst television had already been displaying various characters – mostly from the music scene – whose gender identity and sexual orientation were not seen by the public as “traditional”. In the same year, the fifteen-year-old company “Bagaglino”, run by Mario Castellacci and Pier Francesco Pingitore, abandoned the genre of cabaret and started a new course putting on stage a musical comedy called Oh Gay!, trying to take advantage of the huge success of the Italian-French film La cage aux folles. The comedy is about a gay couple involved in the imaginary kidnapping of the Pope and it combines satire about the gloomy situation of Rome in the Years of Lead with a bland mockery of the multiplication of LGBT people in Italy.