When the Audience Is the Point
Two new theatrical works – Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? and Dylan MarcAurele’s Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical – arrive from a place most stage productions don’t bother visiting: the inside of gay fandom itself, where devotion gets funny, strange, and occasionally devastating.
The Shows, Separately Considered
Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? operates at an angle that’s hard to categorize cleanly. The title alone does several things at once – it’s a question about honesty, a wink at the name Frank, and an implicit interrogation of what it costs to be direct about desire, identity, or just about anything else a queer person might want to say out loud in a room full of strangers. That doubled meaning runs through the whole piece.
MarcAurele’s Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical leans into different territory. The word “unauthorized” in the title signals something about its relationship to its source material – it’s working from the outside in, taking the kind of intense, proprietary feeling that fans develop around athletes, celebrities, or fictional characters and asking what happens when that feeling gets theatricalized. Making it a musical sharpens the comedy considerably.
Emily Nussbaum, reviewing both productions for The New Yorker, frames them together under the idea that gay fandom is generating genuinely new material – not just as subject matter but as a formal engine. That’s a useful lens. Both shows treat fandom not as a punchline or a pathology but as a creative and emotional mode with its own logic, its own interior rules, and its own capacity for producing work that lands harder than you’d expect.
There’s something worth noting about the timing. These productions aren’t riding a wave of mainstream acceptance so much as they’re doing something more idiosyncratic – mining a very specific cultural position for theatrical material that feels personal without being confessional in the tired, workshop-reading sense. The comedy in both cases comes from recognition rather than explanation.
What Gay Fandom Actually Produces
Heated Rivalry takes its name seriously. Rivalries – between teams, between stars, between people who will never meet – are spaces where projection runs at full speed. Fans don’t just watch; they construct entire emotional architectures around outcomes that don’t affect them. MarcAurele seems interested in what that construction looks like from inside a gay sensibility specifically, where the stakes of admiring someone – especially a male athlete or performer – have historically carried additional weight. Making that into a musical means the songs carry the argument in a way that straight dramatic structure can’t quite manage. Music lets feeling be simultaneously sincere and absurd, which is exactly the register this kind of material requires.
Bassichis works differently. Can I Be Frank? is moving in ways that Heated Rivalry isn’t necessarily trying to be. Where MarcAurele’s piece leans into the comic mechanics of obsession, Bassichis appears more interested in what frankness costs – what gets said when the usual filters come down, and what that kind of saying looks like in a theatrical context. The question in the title isn’t rhetorical. It’s doing real work throughout.
Together, the two productions make a case that queer fandom – specifically gay fandom – has developed enough of a distinct internal culture to sustain theatrical examination without requiring outside explanation. Neither show seems to be pitching itself to an audience that needs the premise spelled out. That confidence in the material is part of what makes both of them function. A show that has to stop and explain why any of this matters usually loses the thread of why it matters.
Nussbaum’s read on both productions is that they succeed in being funny and moving – two things that are genuinely difficult to pull off at the same time, and even harder to achieve when the material is as self-aware as this. Meta-theatrical work has a long history of collapsing under the weight of its own cleverness, using layers of irony as insulation against the risk of actually feeling something. What distinguishes Can I Be Frank? and Heated Rivalry is that the self-awareness doesn’t function as armor. It’s more like a delivery system.
There’s a particular skill in writing comedy that emerges from a cultural position rather than simply describing that position. Bassichis and MarcAurele are both working from the inside out – the jokes don’t require quotation marks, the emotion doesn’t require footnotes. That directness is harder to manufacture than it looks, and both shows appear to have found it through specificity rather than through any attempt to generalize the experience outward for broader consumption. “The Audacity,” which takes a similarly insider-specific angle on Silicon Valley satire, works through comparable instincts – the sharper the target, the less the work needs to explain itself.
Why These Two, Why Now
Pairing these productions under a single review – as Nussbaum does in the June 15, 2026 issue of The New Yorker – makes a quiet argument that something is happening in this particular corner of theatrical work. Whether that’s a genuine trend or simply two strong shows arriving in proximity is a different question, and probably not one worth answering too quickly. What’s clear is that both productions found their way to material that works on its own terms.
Bassichis and MarcAurele are writing from a place where the audience’s recognition is part of the texture of the work – where knowing the references, sharing the specific quality of attention that fandom requires, makes the show land differently than it would for someone coming to it cold. That’s a bet. It assumes a room full of people who don’t need the punchline explained, and it leaves something to chance every night depending on who actually shows up.
