Welcome to day four of our week of theater. As we make our way towards this Sunday’s Tony Awards, we’re covering our favorite things about the stage. Today, which also happens to be National Best Friends Day, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss a few of the many friendships covered in countless plays and musicals. Fair warning, this short list is a little musical heavy.
Theater is an art form built on trust. There’s the trust between the performers, and trust between the entire production crew (quick changes don’t happen on their own). Even as an audience member, you enter into an agreement with the performers that you will suspend your disbelief for a little while and enter this fictional world. So, it makes sense that an art form based on this kind of trust would produce a lot of stories about friendships.
They’re not all perfect, in fact, most of them aren’t. After all, even at its zaniest theater is meant to reflect reality. With that in mind, here’s just a few of some of the many great friendships of the stage.
First up, there’s the “bosom buddies” themselves, Mame Dennis and Vera Charles. These two women have a friendship built on honesty of the brutal variety. While they may have their disagreements, they know they can rely on the other to always tell them the truth.
Okay, so this one is technically a movie (and then a TV show), but it was a play first by Neil Simon first (look it up). Oscar and Felix may be dysfunctional a lot of the time, but they definitely qualify as best friends (whether they like it or not).
No list of fictional theater friendships would be complete without Elphie and Glinda (the Ga is silent). These two prove that sometimes perceived enemies make better friends.
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