THEATRE: PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT

Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert – The Musical, at The Palace Theatre in London’s West End, received a standing ovation for a burlesque show that makes Mama Mia! look tame.

Here, O.T.T. is the name of the game as two drag queens and a transsexual take a trip through Oz on their very own yellow brick road that’s paved in pink and discover that home is where the heart is. Two of these, Oliver Thornton as Adam/Felicia and Tony Sheldon as Bernadette, certainly give what it takes to deliver full throttle tunes and lip-syncing laughs to their full effect and Jason Donovan, as Tick/Mitzi, performs with the anxiety of a gay man facing the possible rejection of coming out to his son – at times awkwardly.

It’s euphoric and fun as it lights up the Australian outback with every cliché in the book – lavish, loud and lewd – an enjoyable romp where Brian Thompson’s production design, Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner’s costumes, Ross Coleman’s choreography and the show-stopping songs are the real stars of a production whose success is more spectacular than fulfilling as Simon Phillips directs this effervescent juke box of excess. Snappy wise cracks and bitchy put downs pepper a script sandwiched between hit after hit of disco-dolly delirium and euphorically skates over the surface of the deeper distress of the three protagonists.

A comic cameo by Kana Nakano playing Cynthia, a mail-order bride whose party piece involving ping pong balls appearing from down under to the tune of pop music, sets the benchmark of a show that’s deliciously below the belt. Rising just above the waistline, Daniele Coombes’ Shirley raises more than a titter with her XXL prosthetic, bouncing breasts. The humour is shame-facedly Australian and a much better advertisement for a country’s tourist trade that was left reeling by Baz Luhrmann’s tight-lipped melodrama, Australia. Tristan Temple’s cameo entertainingly pokes fun at the white man’s probing of the Aboriginal interior and as Jimmy he exploits his native roots for his own financial gain – hoodwinking a group of holidaymakers.

It’s the three divas, played by Zoë Birkett, Kate Gillespie and Emma Lindars, and the excellent company of dancers who add the necessary sheen to this spit and polish world of machismo and prejudice. Like angels they fly in and out of the action and act as ethereal creatures in an ephemeral world that just keeps on telling the same old story – that all you need is love.

Since Civil Partnerships seem all the rage today, didgeridoo go and see this if you’re planning a hen night or a night on the tiles, didgeridon’t if you like Sondheim.

Perfect antidote to the insanity of the extremist Muslim preacher of hate who only this week visited London and declared all homosexuals should be stoned to death.

Verdict: Fizzy pop with a kick. Australian’s wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else – does what it says on the tin.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – The Musical
The Palace Theatre
Shaftesbury Avenue,
London,
W1D 8AY

Booking to 26th September 2009
http://www.palace-theatre.co.uk/