As the dancers go over a sequence, Parker explains that “Never Will I Marry,’’ the song he was singing, expresses “what I felt as a young gay boy, believing that I could never marry. But the great thing is that now gays can marry.’’ In “Misters and Sisters,’’ he says, the company celebrates that fact “with ‘Let’s Have an Old-Fashioned Wedding,’ in the finale.’’ It’s another tune from the Great American Songbook, the source of all the show’s music.
David Parker’s father, the detective novelist Robert B. Parker, who died in 2010 at 77, introduced his son to those tunes. “I created this without the net of irony and sarcasm,’’ he says. “It’s a first for me. I feel liberated. I dedicate it to my father.’’
Parker, 52, often uses his own experience as inspiration for his works, but “Misters and Sisters’’ is the most autobiographical show he has ever choreographed. It charts his more than 20-year friendship, not romance, with Kazin. It’s a relationship born of similar childhoods in the Boston suburbs in the 1970s - Parker in Lynnfield and Kazin in Waltham, where they grew up feeling like outsiders - and fueled by their mutual love of musical theater. They formed the Bang Group in 1996, with Parker as artistic director and Kazin described as “muse.’’
“I felt the word ‘bang’ should be in our official name,’’ Parker says, “because it refers to rhythm, percussion, explosion, and sex.’’
“Misters and Sisters’’ weaves a story that begins with them as insecure children - the song “In My Own Little Corner’’ catches their loneliness and escape into fantasy - and concludes with hope and confidence. Along the way, Parker provides narrative opportunity for “Tea for Two,’’ “Baby It’s Cold Outside,’’ and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,’’ among other standards.
