Just about 15 months ago—March 2024, to be exact—the musical Dead Outlaw opened with little or no fanfare at Manhattan’s Minetta Lane Theatre. Immediately, the production startled and amused musical lovers, enough so that it was Broadway-transferred during the 2024-2025 season. The production then became what many consider the best American musical of that just-concluded stretch.
Guess what: Beau, an incoming, fanfareless new musical, has just opened at Theater 154 (the former New Ohio Theatre), and it might not be a bad bet that this upstart will be considered among the top few American musicals by the end of the just-underway 2025-2026 season.
What’s so outstanding about the project, for which the concept, book and lyrics are by Douglas Lyons and the music is by Ethan D. Pakchar and Lyons? The easy answer: Everything about it.
Set in 2013 and the years shortly following in Nashville and Memphis, the instant click unfurls on designer Daniel Allen’s blaring barroom with stage for seven musicians who double as the Beau characters. Hey, fellas and gals, this is the story of Ace Baker (Matt Rodin) coming to terms with his sexuality as well as with his long-absent grandfather Beau (Chris Blisset). Lyons’ intricately gritty plot is. by its series of turns, simultaneously deadly serious and life-affirmingly jubilant.
Ace, barely entering adolescence, lives with his loving but tough mother, Raven (Amelia Cormack), who’s goal has been shielding him from any word of his Memphis-based grandfather, who’s still keeping a secret about his past and present. (Rodin plays guitar, Cormack mandolin.) Discovering his gay impulses, Ace is bullied by nasty Ferris (Cory Jeacoma) until, that is…spoil alert alerted, at least for the time being. (Jeacoma plays guitar.)
Luckily for Ace, Beau—who’s ailing—gets in touch in the nick of time. The unexpected call leads to Ace spending a first summer in Memphis and profiting from dad’s introductory guitar lesson. The outcome leads to: an improved relationship with Raven; a slow-maturing relationship with Larry (Matt Wolpe), the glad-handing man in Raven’s life; and to eventual confidences exchanged with best friend Daphney (Miyuki Miyagi). (Wolpe play bass, Miyagi violin). Drummer Derek Stoltenberg is occasionally seen as Beau’s special friend. Pianist Andrea Goss triples as other pertinent figures.
Lyons has spent at least seven years here and there developing Beau, the explanation for the resulting attributes that lifts the high quality outcome. He’s varnished the consistently emotional relationships: the sometimes strained but scrupulously honest episodes during which Ace experiences the misunderstandings and ultimate understandings between Ace and Raven, between Ace and Beau, and between Ace and Ferris. Lyons presents these complicated lives as lives utterly, believably lived.
Maybe the major inspiration here—surely one of the many—is telling the family story within the framework of a locale identified as The Distillery (much is definitely distilled). The joint offers a seven-piece band ready to let go with sounds perhaps best described as country-western-rock. And once in a while, an eighth musician makes a guest appearance: the grizzled, determined Beau.
Going into their numbers, the actor-musicians (or are they musician-actors?) turn them into slick routines created by makes-no-mistakes director and choreographer Josh Rhodes. Suddenly, the explosive septet unleashes unison swaying this way and that, like trombonists in a 1940s big band.
What they’re playing, of course, is the Lyons-Pakchar score, a score as strong (if not stronger) than any heard around these parts in some time. Needless to say, the songs elaborate on exchanges between and among the coping characters. As arranged by music supervisor Chris Gurr and orchestrated by Pakchar, each inclusion has its irresistible heartbeat strum.
Incidentally, Lyons as lyricist has about the same attitude towards perfect rhymes as anyone else currently scoring musicals, but the feelings behind his numbers are genuinely conveyed. “It Couldn’t Be,” a love song for two men (won’t say which two), is one of the few convincing love songs to emerge on a musical comedy stage in a woeful time. Impressive fact: Five of the 10 songs are rendered with hot verve by Ace Baker & Company.
Undeniably, there is that the hold-the-phone cast, each a stand-out. They’re headed by Rodin, whom unrelenting musical-goers will recognize as hardly having ended an extremely recent run in Adam Gwon’s highly recommended All the World’s a Stage.
Barely recognizable now as Ace Baker, Rodin commanded notice then as a timid math teacher in a small Pennsylvania town who must find himself in order to fight for a larger right. Further similarities between the parts have to do with both men being gay and both reluctant to admit that truth to a good friend.
Final observation: Beau is the third show to have bowed within less than two weeks wherein a gay man has had to face up to his choice (or is it a choice?) not only to accept himself but to demand that the world accept him. The others are Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot and Rob Madge’s My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?).
Maybe the emerging triumvirate has to do with June being Pride month. On the other hand, maybe pride has nothing to do with it. As is often reiterated, pride goeth before a fall, but each of these works is about learning how—at last and after much self-exploration—to rise up valiantly.
Beau the Musical opened June 13, 2025, at Theatre 154 and runs through July 27. Tickets and information: ootbtheatrics.com
