The Boy Band Project Brunch Brings Back TRL Era in Riverhead

Fans of groups like NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys and Boyz II Men are in for a treat this Sunday when The Boy Band Project brings a special Boy Band Brunch performance to The Suffolk in Riverhead. The nostalgia-fueled show will be an afternoon of TRL-era singing, dancing, hot guys and laughs, not to mention some delicious food and cool cocktails.

“We do a 90-minute show with a brief intermission. Afterwards we sell T-shirts, buttons, we do meet and greets, you can take photos, we’ll sign your shirt, we’ll do the whole nine yards,” explains The Boy Band Project member Chris Hanford, just one of the impossibly handsome and super talented performers in the group.

Along their chiseled jawlines, shredded abs and boyish good looks, Hanford and his bandmates demonstrate some serious singing and dancing chops throughout the show.

“It’s some heavy choreography. We are moving. We even have a whole dance mega-mix that we do,” Hanford says, noting that most members of The Boy Band Project are Broadway theater actors working between show contracts, so they all know what they’re doing onstage. “Everybody gets their own solo and we are just dancing the whole time. We have light up shoes… It gets to be a big party and a good time,” he continues, pointing out that their performance is often dictated by the crowd. If it’s an afternoon with lots of children in attendance, they might play things a little safer and less rowdy than they likely would for a bachelorette party, for example.

“We actually have quite a bit of shows that do have a bunch of kids there, and a lot of it is improv, so we take it upon ourselves to gauge a room. If we have kids out there enjoying it, rocking out to it, then we might censor a little bit,” Hanford says. He also explains that while they work extremely hard to put together a fantastic show, they also don’t take themselves or the boy band genre too seriously.

“The funny thing is, we walk the fine line of like kind of taking the piss out of boy bands, because it can be a little silly, the thought of a boy band, but it still just really works… So you’re like, oh my God, this is so silly that this is happening right now, but gosh is that man singing!” Hanford says. “To walk that fine line, we pay homage to how truly good they were, but also how silly it was,” he adds.

“By the end of the show, they’re eating out of the palm of our hands and everybody is in on the laugh and all the jokes,” Hanford says. “Even if a sound cue goes wrong by accident — it’s live theater and things happen — normally we’ll crack a joke and the audience is laughing along with us. It’s just a really good, fun loving, everybody is there to have fun on and offstage, time. It’s so nice.”

The Boy Band Project’s typical shows focus heavily on the 1980s and ’90s groups, like NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Hanson, 98 Degrees, O-town, Boyz II Men and New Kids on the Block, to name a few, but they will also dip farther into the past and future, including  groups from the 2000s like the Jonas Brothers and One Direction, or older groups like The Beatles, The Beach Boys or The Four Seasons.

“You could catch a couple different versions (of the show). We have multiple boy band members, so sometimes we have a show going on in LA while we’re doing a brunch in the city. They’ll have the costumes for the Backstreet Boys opening and the people in the city will have the costumes for the Four Seasons-Beatles opening,” Hanford says, revealing how The Boy Band Project has grown since founder and CEO Travis Nesbitt created it in 2014 and found great success as a weekly Boy Band Brunch event in NYC.

Now the show has toured the world, performed in major theaters, written their own music and been featured aboard various cruise lines. Fans of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live might recognize some of the guys as bartenders on that show, while others may have seen them on Good Morning America.

“Like a year ago, a friend of mine invited me to a boy band brunch. I thought it was like a drag brunch basically, so I showed up and no, it was a true boy band show with brunch,” Hanford says, recalling his first encounter with the Boy Band Project. “It was actually this show that I was watching and I was like, Oh my goodness, How the hell do I get in that?”

Before long, Hanford says his roommate joined the group and he joined soon after that. “The next thing you knew, I was a member. And, full circle, I was performing on the same stage I saw them on,” he adds, noting that he had always wanted to be in a boy band, but that dream was dead by the time he was 30 years old.

Fortunately, The Boy Band Project members are all in their 30s and 40s — though they take such good care of themselves, they look closer to being in their 20s — so Hanford was a perfect fit.

“I’m new but I feel like I’ve been doing this forever, because I just clicked with them right away,” he says, adding later, “Boy bands are making a comeback. I’m seeing them everywhere.”

The Suffolk is located at 118 E. Main Street in Riverhead. Go see The Boy Band Project there and enjoy a tasty brunch on Sunday, June 23. Brunch begins at 11 a.m. and the show starts at noon. Learn more at get tickets at thesuffolk.com.

Follow The Boy Band Project on Instagram @boybandproject or visit theboybandproject.net.