Grindr, a hook-up smartphone app used by 6m gay and bisexual men around the world, might perhaps not seem like the most likely inspiration for an opera, but if its librettist and composer Erik Ransom has his way, there won’t be a dry eye in the house as the rendition of Cum Dumpster reaches its rousing conclusion.
The show, as Ransom told Sean Moncrieff earlier this week, has just finished a series of stage readings around cult venues in New York, with the hope of kicking off an off-Broadway run come the autumn season.
While the subject matter of casual and hard-core sex between (what are essentially) consenting male strangers might leave a bad taste in the mouths of some, the musical treatment is campy and tongue in cheek, but not without some salient points to make about love, relationships, self-worth, and sex in the modern world. And sometimes it’s easier to make those statements with a counter-tenor drag queen storming the stage as an anthropomorphised application.
As Ransom told Sean Moncrieff, writing the opera was all about understanding the different kinds of connections that people are looking for today:The modern phenomenon of app-based hook ups has spread beyond the gay community, but the casual culture of making immediate judgments of whether or not you want to have sex with someone based on a few pictures and some lines of conversation took off in force with gay men. But reducing Grindr to that cold appraisal isn’t necessarily fair, Ransom says. The app, he argues, isn’t quite as cold as Tinder, its hetero-embracing counterpart, which offers users the chance for rejection with a self-esteem eroding ‘Nope’ – though they only know of that if they do some rejecting themselves.
But Grindr isn’t without its flaws, either, with Ransom telling Sean that the highs of quick approval can be matched by lows:But looking past any navel-gazing claims into the emotional weight of using an app like Grindr, Sean just wanted to get to the cut and thrust of what the app is best known for in straight circles – an awful lot of penis pictures:Broadway’s theatrical scene has always embraced gay, alternative, and queer culture, and the recent success of the musicals Kinky Boots and Hedwig & the Angry Inch means that the time for an opera based on Grindr to find its voice and take to the stage has never been better. Whether audiences will look at what it’s offering and coldly issuing a damning ‘Nope’ is a risk Ransom and his company are willing to take.
You can listen back to the full interview from Moncrieff below, and tune in to the show weekdays from 1.30pm to 4.30pm.
Grindr isn't the only pop-cultural influence to have changed the face opera. Check out the gallery below to see the others, and let us know any others we might have missed:
