Chicago's Playground Theater showing hilarious "Queer Eye" musical parody

Chicago, IL - Right as Netflix dropped the third season of its popular "Queer Eye" reboot, a new musical parody made its debut at Boystown's Playground Theater.

"Queer Eye: The Musical Parody" followed the Fab Five (occasionally joined by an unwelcome Betty Who) as they helped loveable, unkempt loser Sam, played by Bryson Howard, transform into his inner Adonis, played by Evan Mulroony.

The show poked fun at all the characters, from Antoni, played by Eddie Miller, who sung a musical number "Food for Thot," to Karamo, played by Donovan Session, who struggled to empathize with Sam's weird interests and constantly questioned his purpose on the show.

The musical parody was the first full feature written by Evan Mills, who also played Tan. The idea for a Queer Eye-themed show came to him while he performed with Second City at the Kennedy Center. "I was there for two months, and during that time I had a lot of downtime," Mills recalled. "I was like, what am I obsessed with right now? Queer Eye. What do I want to do? I want to write a musical with all this free time. So I sat down and knocked it all out."

Mills approached Bryson Howard for the role of Sam, the leading man, and said he wrote the script with Howard in mind. Howard admitted this was a new challenge for him. "Its the first [role] that required singing, dancing, and lines in every scene almost," Howard said. "Its a lot of pressure, but its a blast. Even when it's overwhelming, it's such a good script, great music, wonderful voices, and it's just a whole lot of fun."

Howard was not entirely familiar with "Queer Eye" when he started this process. "I got to the audition and I was like 'to be clear with you guys, I've watched three episodes, but I'm on board' and I just watched all the first two seasons in a weekend and cried and laughed and ranked them in order," he confessed. "I love it. I watched the entire third season last Saturday on my bed because I was a little hung over."

The third season of the Netflix show premiered during the play's opening weekend, entirely by coincidence. "We were all shocked. We were like 'this is fate'," exclaimed Mills. "How did this happen? How did we time this out?" Despite initial concerns that fans would be too distracted by the release of new episodes to see the play, it appeared to be very popular. The Saturday night showing was sold out.

The show will continue every Thursday through Saturday night at The Playground Theater until April 27, taking a week off during the first week of April. For ticket information, go to theplaygroundtheater.com