Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott,
directed by Simon Phillips
Mirvish Productions, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
October 26, 2010- January 2, 2011
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is like cotton candy--colourful, machine-made, fluffy and sickly sweet but silly fun. The show is not so much a musical as a nightclub-style drag revue that attempts, intermittently, to tell a story. The single Oscar the original 1994 film won was for Costume Design and costumes, more than anything else, are what the show is all about.
You’ve heard of jukebox musicals--musicals built around a pre-existing group of songs. Well, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert may the first iTunes musical since no one jukebox would carry such a odd hodgepodge of styles. Classic disco predominates with Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer, but there are detours into country and western, the 1930s, opera, Elvis and 1990s house. The fact that the song list has changed radically from the original Sydney production to the London version to this, demonstrates that, unlike a real musical, Priscilla does not tell its story through its songs. But then, the story itself is weak. Marion (Jessica Phillips), owner of a nightclub in Alice Springs in the middle of the Australian outback thinks it’s time that her husband Tick (Will Swenson), a drag queen, should see his six-year-old son. How this situation arose is never explained. To lure him she promises him a gig at her club and Tick takes along Bernadette (Tony Sheldon), an aging recently widowed transexual, and Felicia (Nick Adams), a drag princess, and drives off in their bus “Priscilla.”
Of the three principals, Adams is the only one who can really sing, dance and act and he wows in all three. Acting is Sheldon’s forte and without him the show would lose its only nuanced character portrayal. Swenson is the nominal “star,” but he is not convincing as a gay character and too often sings off-key. C. David Johnson makes a fine contribution as a caring down-to-earth yet inexplicably tranny-friendly outback guy. His ad libs saved the show when it ground to halt because of a technical glitch. The costumes by Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner are so completely over-the-top that they really don’t qualify as drag. Except for the tasteful 1940s-style gowns for Bernadette, they frequently make Tick and Felicia look more like Day-Glo aliens from old Star Trek episodes than any known gender of human being. When you see that the chorus, males and females, are dressed in the same kooky duds, whether as paintbrushes or melting cakes, you know that outlandishness itself, not drag is the main point. When confetti cannons go off halfway through Act 1, you know the show has started way too big and has nowhere to go. When the cast rounds up audience members for a pointless dance to start Act 2, you realize the show is really just a sing-along, clap-along panto for adults and that you can’t take anything in it seriously--including its few, very clunky attempts at being serious.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-10-28.
Photo: Foreground Will Swenson, Tony Sheldon, Nick Adams. ©Joan Marcus.
2010-10-28
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert