More Unexpected Theatrical Beefcake

You go to see Tarzan primarily to see a buffed guy in a loincloth. There may be other reasons to go to Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but a half-naked Stanley or Brick is certainly among the top ten. But even serious dramas and quirky small-stage comedies can surprise you with beefcake.

Scandalous, about the famed 1920s evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, featured Edward Watts playing David Hutton, offering the the forbidden fruit.

Heavier Than displays Nick Ballard as Minotaur of ancient Greek myth turning 30 and leaving his twink years behind him, and Casey Kringlen as a skinny Icarus who has a crush on him.








Fela, a musical about Nigerian singer Fela Kuti, starred a shirtless Sahr Ngaujah.


















A Clockwork Orange yobs.

Fun fact: For most of my life, I thought that the novel and movie referred to an orange clock.  I didn't realize that clockwork means mechanical, so "a mechanical orange."

Neither title makes any sense.  The play is about a gang of hooligans in a dystopian future.

I'll bet you didn't know that Hamlet  had a physique like that.  In this modern rendition starring Paapa Essiedu , he does.

Or that Shylock in Merchant of Venice was a beefy bear.


More after the break.

Like all of Tennessee Williams' plays, Night of the Iguana is about hidden passions surfacing in someplace with a tropical climate, so you might expect that some of the actors would take their shirts off.

Like all of Sam Shepherd's plays, The Buried Child is about people yelling at each other.  With their shirts off.

Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which uses the Salem Witch Trials as a metaphor for modern political witch hunts, is a favorite of high school and college drama clubs.   But this is the only time I've seen a shirtless John Proctor (played by Richard Armitage).

Town Hall Affair  brings us back to 1971 for a debate about Women's Liberation moderated by none other than troglodyte Norman Mailer. Tempers flare, and shirts come off.

The Recommendation, about a privileged rich kid (Brandon Gill' and his pecs) who gets sent to prison, has a prison-towel scene.