Naked Boys Singing!

This film is a taped showing of a musical which features naked men dancing and singing about men and gay related issues.

Maybe it is because I did not even know about this show, I was pleasantly surprised by it. I was entertained throughout. I especially liked "Fight the Urge", "Jack's Song" and "Perky Little Porn Star" which featured very funny lyrics and hilarious performances. I think the lyrics are witty, and they certainly put effort in to make the lyrics rhyme. "Window To Window" is another good song as it captures yearning for intimacy very well. Others have criticised the miming, but I think it's OK, as they have not attempted to hide this fact.

I think "Naked Boys Singing" deserves more praise, as I was entertained by such a good performance. Let's not forget that takes a lot of courage to perform on stage naked.

I finnaly saw the Broadway version, as some years ago i saw the version created in my own country. The musical is very funny! The boys are great artists and talented! It' quite original and I really apreciated it!

What surprised me the most about this filmed stage production was the splendid variety in the musical numbers. The dancing is professional. Each dance is well choreographed. The vocals are entertaining, and pleasant to listen to. All numbers are done with heart and humor. This was truly a unique experience. I'm surprised at the arrogant remarks posted in other IMDb reviews. I found Naked Boys Singing highly enjoyable and fresh. Just look at the expression on the audiences faces. These talented guys offer a good sock in the jaw to convention. Intelligence and humor are the threads that hold this production together. Cheers and applause to all involved.

This show has been performed live around the country with a wide variety of casts. I saw it first in the Provincetown production the first summer it was in P-town (2001)--before it was, curiously enough, banned in that overwhelmingly gay resort (the codes which resulted in its closing have since been amended). I saw it again later in the off-Broadway, long-running production in New York. Oddly enough, the P-town production was far better than the New York one--fresher, cuter, more spirited and funnier--but that was only in the 2001 showing; subsequent attempts to clone the production ("Bare Naked Lads" in 2007) were definitely third-rate. This filmed production features a Los Angelos production cast, and it is, as other comments have suggested, not the best. I would rate it somewhere in between the top-notch 2001 P-town production and the third-rate "Bare Naked Lads" P-town show from last summer.

If you haven't seen the stage version of Naked Boys Singing! (NBS), then what more can you do but see this film. The film's fun, campy, well-acted, well-sung and has lots of inspired choreography. However, compared to the live stage version, the film misfires conceptually, has truly cheesy "just graduated from film-school editing" and doesn't do justice to the essential intimacy of the material -- it neither delivers a good film nor a piece of theater-on-film. // Before writing this review, I watched the "making of" segment (titled "Nuts and Bolts") to find out how the producer/director could have gone astray with excellent material and a stage production that literally sells itself. Biggest problem: They tried to reimagine NBS as a film, making the same sad mistake foisted upon A Chorus Line -- both shows are perfect as-is and were designed to be seen in a theater from a center row in the Orchestra (and in the case of NBS, the second row): Why add all the superfluous cut-aways, back stories, reverse angles (again, an audience isn't supposed to see what the actors see), cutesy effects (slo-mo, sepia tones, dissolves, multiple-image shots, etc.)? This screams "I'm trying everything they taught me in film school." Moreover, introducing the numbers by showing the musical scores gives a documentary feel to what should be a live production. Why incorporate techniques from an dissonant genre? Hasn't anyone seen the excellent Sondheim recordings of his stage productions? They record the performance. Period. That said, there is the issue of how to record the actors...no body mics. But somehow, when I saw NBS in New York in that intimate little theater in the Village, no one needed a mic. So, I reject the rationale that they had to lip-sync everything to get the recording. No, they had to lip-sync in order to support all the cheesy/cutesy editing techniques! So much time and effort could have been saved had they simply filmed the show in a, er, straight-forward fashion. Simple, direct, intimate...that's what drives the NBS source material -- and the film introduces too much schlock and unnecessary distractions.