Film

Singing showtunes in the buff is a scary proposition, but the cast members of Naked Boys are all too willing to prove they have the balls. Phew, now that we’ve got the dumb pun out of our system, on with the meat of the review. Once you put a bunch of nude hunks on a stage, the dick jokes are irresistible, especially to the songwriters behind the wildly successful Naked Boys theatrical franchise. They’ve got a whole number that’s just a chorus of names for a man’s equipment, and the blue (and very gay) humor never lets up, from “The Bliss of a Bris” to “Perky Little Porn Star.”

The cast is an almost too-pretty group that mixes members (there we go again…) of the original L.A. cast with performers from the Off Broadway version. With lots of ethnic diversity but nary a love handle in sight, they look like a Benetton ad sans clothes. They’re uniformly talented, and they sell even the weaker numbers as if they were doing Sondheim. But the filmmakers have two problems: First, the thrill of live nudity is lost in the transition to film; second, Schrock and Christian employ impatient editing and weird dissolves, as if they were nervous that the material might not hold our interest. With a show like this, you’ve got to be cocky.