Colchester Fringe Festival 2025
Spooky & Gay
Bruce Ryan Costella
Genre: Cabaret, Comedy, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA+, One Person Show, Storytelling
Venue: Three Wise Monkeys
Festival: Colchester Fringe Festival
Low Down
Bruce Ryan Costella’s Spooky & Gay is indeed spooky and gay, but behind its spooks, there lies a queer heart of gold. Simple and yet emotionally stirring, Spooky & Gay brilliantly reaffirms why Halloween is the queer Christmas.
Review
Bruce Ryan Costella’s Spooky & Gay is full of surprises. So immediately unassuming, using nothing more than clever lighting, eerie sounds, and a small collection of paper-printed slides, one could wrongly assume Spooky & Gay will lack dynamism and scares. By the time the first story ends, Costella has the audience in his trance. He is a powerful storyteller and arguably has created one of the most powerful queer storytelling cabarets in fringe theatre. I walked out of the theatre and said very bluntly to Colchester Fringe’s organizers, “If Bruce does not win an award this year, I am throwing a fit.” He won two and rightly so.
Costella uses only a collection of flashlights, controlled via foot pedals, to light the stage. This creates an eerie and dynamic atmosphere feeling akin to that spooky face against the fire or the flashlight under the chin. A small collection of audio cues heightens tension and dramatizes the stories. Costella understands that a good story will do all the work, everything else is just supplementary.
Costella is a dynamic performer, swapping between stand-up comedy, scary stories, and honest reflection. Spooky & Gay has a strong mixture of performance types. The strongest aspects were by far the main stories. In particular, Costella’s reflection on the ghosts of gay bars left me in tears. Though to say too much, like any ghost story, would ruin the suspense and surprises. It was powerful enough that my friend had to hand me a tissue. I was expecting to scream, not cry, but like all good horror, Costella’s stories touch on powerful and potent themes of queerness. The horror stories reflect on AIDS, mass shootings, self-hatred, gender, and more. Yet, these themes are never pretentious and lie behind strong characterization, jack o’ lanterns, and the pink death.
I will not pretend that I am not the exact target audience for this show. (My master’s thesis was on queer horror and we’re both *unfortunately* Floridians.) Maybe a straight audience member or one with less love of horror will not find Costella as interesting. I can tell you with all certainty it is one of the greatest examples of queer horror theatre out there. Spooky & Gay is queer storytelling perfected.
