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I feel as though what may have happened here is they went back to the film and they heard that line that Guy Pearce has when he says, I hereby christen this budget Barbie Kemper, Priscilla Queen of the Desert. And they were like, you know what budget? And just ran with it. And listen, I have a lot of room in my heart for Priscilla Queen of the Desert on stage. I have seen this show multiple times over the years, always on tour, and I have watched it get gradually cheaper and cheaper. Looking Admittedly, theatre has also in the same time become more expensive to stage. I know how expensive these big musicals are and how expensive it is to tour them. However, when a show like Priscilla Queen of the Desert is brought back in an admittedly more minimal production, it is, for want of a better word, a drag. And on that note. Oh my God. Hey, welcome to my theatre themed YouTube channel or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. If you're meeting me for the first time, my name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am an independent theatre critic here on social media and a content creator. And earlier this week I headed to Wokie Theatre, a venue where I used to work as a front of house staff member where I caught the new UK tour of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Currently traveling around the country and like I said, I have a lot of fond history seeing this show on stage. Being a part of a community theatre production of this show. Technically I did not make it on stage, but I was at the side of the stage singing tenor harmonies in a thick Australian accent, having broken multiple bones, auditioning to be a singing train in Starlight Express. The real ones already know that story and that does mean I think I'm always going to find some way to enjoy this musical on stage. However, it also means that I have notes and there is plenty to say about this production. I'll be sharing all of my thoughts with you today in this full review, but if you have had the chance to see this on tour already around the country, I would love to know what you thought. Let me know in the comments section down below. And as always, if you would like to hear more of my theatre reviews, then you can find them wherever you are seeing my face or hearing my voice. Make sure to subscribe here on YouTube or follow me on podcast platforms. And if you want to keep up to date with absolutely everything that I see at the theatre, as well as every piece of content that I share about it online, you can sign up to my free weekly subscription newsletter at the link in the Description for now though, it is time to discuss the latest bedazzled outing of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. So let's begin by talking about the show itself, the material and the entire vibe, I guess, of this production. The musical, of course, is Based on the 1994 film the Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which starred Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce as three drag performers traveling together in a bus across the Australian outback in order to put on a show and trying to survive in the process. And it offered both a gritty and glittery look at the lives of the queer community in rural and metropolitan settings. The stage musical, which of course premiered in Australia, subsequently transferring to the West End and Broadway, retains all of the heart and soul of that story, but combines it with a jukebox disco score with both diegetic and non diegetic songs. Some of them are fantasy sequences, some of them are movies, emotional confessions through song. Others are drag performances ingeniously, and this is one of the masterstrokes of the stage adaptation. They deploy three divas who provide live vocals that are on occasion lip synced to by the drag performers, the trio of drag performers in the show. Those characters are for the benefit of anyone who hasn't encountered them, Tick, AKA Mitzi Mitosis, a struggling drag queen who gets an unexpected call from his surprising ex wife to travel out and create a new drag show for her at her casino in Alice Springs and in the process meet his young son who he has never had the chance to meet, an iconic veteran performer and trans woman named Bernadette, eager to find meaningful romantic fulfillment later in life, and a spunky young performer who does things a little bit differently and in fact who does things however he chooses, named Adam, AKA Felicia Jolly Goodfellow. The three of them embark together somewhat reluctantly on this pilgrimage, desert holiday, depending on which one you ask. And much of the heart of the story, in addition to exploring their plight and persecution, is the unlikely friendship that forms between this little trio. I've often said that musicals at their core need only a few things in order to really work and a great story, great songs are two of those things, and Priscilla absolutely has both of those. I think this remains one of the strongest screen to stage musical adaptations. I think the writing is deceptively brilliant. The way that these songs have been utilized. It ranges from the absurdly campy like when there is for no real reason a cake left out in the rain, ushering us into an extended performance of MacArthur park for no other reason than it being a disco banger. You also have Don't Leave Me this Way as a toe tapping funeral song and a lot of really astonishingly good musical arrangements. The finale Megamix is to die for, but there are also, as per the show's approach of offering a little heart and soul beneath all of the camp and the color, a handful of moving and meaningful moments as well. Not just the obvious like True Colors, but also a wonderful little reprise of I say a Little Prayer for you mashed up with you were always on my Mind, a beautiful father son bonding moment. I love the arrangement of that song. All of this before we mention the ingenious, occasionally catty, biting wit of the script, based of course on the original screenplay with a book for the stage by Stefan Elliott and Alan Scott. And I put to you that if you are considering going to see Priscilla Queen of the Desert on tour or anywhere around the world, you are always going to have a pretty fantastic time. Occasionally that may be in spite of the production that you are seeing. I think there is still an enormous amount entertainment value in this and I would encourage you to go see it. Even if a lot of my biggest takeaways are about the inherent material and the show itself rather than the creative choices that have been brought to it. This time around, the show sort of succeeds in spite of many of those. So what is this production actually like then, other than minimized? And I'll talk more in just a moment about the specific design choices and direction choices that have kind of reduced the version of Priscilla that we've seen before. Generally this feels in many ways tonally like a return to the vibe of the film. The version we've seen on stage over the years has been particularly glittery, particularly polished, with moments of hardship retained in the plot, but the tone of the whole thing is significantly more saturated this time around, in part due to the brilliant casting of Adele Anderson as Bernadette. It feels as though we are closer to the vibes of the Motion Picture that everything has that little bit more grit in it. Occasionally there are moments where this gets undermined mind as well, but certainly it does feel as though there has been a return to the source material. I'm also wondering whether a handful of script updates that were made for Priscilla the Party, which was a short lived sort of semi immersive version of the show that ran here in London here at Alternate not that long ago, have been retained in the production because there are definitely script changes. There is at least one song that has been added back into the show that used to exist in the original Australian version. I don't think it's ever been heard in a UK production of the show. And that is the Charlene classic I've Never Been to Me, which of course Hugo Weaving performs in the original film. That is the number that Tick used to perform at the drag bar in Sydney towards the beginning some years ago that was changed on stage and absorbed into the opening number, which is It's Raining Men. As we arrive at that Sydney gay club with Tic performing a version of the song incorporating puppets delivering that spoken bit in the middle, the hi, we're your weather girls, etc, now It's Raining Men is simply the introduction of the setting and the divas and Tic comes out to perform I've Never Been to me, a throwback to the film and a little bit of a slower paced introduction to the whole thing and all of our characters. Oh, there's also an entire section which again may have been retained from Priscilla the Party, in which misunderstanding kicks everyone out of the gay bar after they heckle Mitzi off stage and then breaks the fourth wall and does a little bit of banter with the audience before singing what's Love Got To Do with it in Tina Turner style. There are also various changed lines of dialogue. Some lines that Bernadette has and that are said to Bernadette perhaps, I think, been adjusted with a little more sensitivity to positioning trans people as the butt of the joke. Likewise, I'm wondering if there has been some consideration of political correctness when it comes to the depiction of Cynthia. Now, Cynthia is the wife of a character named Bob, a handyman who they meet during their trip through the desert. Cynthia is, shall we say, an extravagant performer of Asian origin, and her material has never been particularly culturally conscientious. And to attempt to stage any version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, that feels utterly politically correct, I think is always going to be slightly fraught. But here she seems to deliver the same lines of dialogue in broken English, but without a faux Thai accent, which basically because of the way that the lines are written leaves us in a slightly ambiguous place. And it feels as though if that is still going to be the material, unless it can be completely reworked, then any attempt to kind of sanitize it a little bit feels sort of moot. There is also a quality of performance throughout the Thing that feels a little more honest, a little more genuine. Bernadette and Adam don't execute the group choreography in exactly the same way. It feels a little bit more like how Terence Stamp would have done it on screen. And it feels more like these are three actual real life and very different drag performers who you are encountering in a real life gay bar. But so much of the conversation around this show has always been and will always be about its aesthetics. Let's talk about set and costume design and some other creative choices. Now. I said it back at the start, I'll say it again. Priscilla is the kind of show that hurts to see done cheaply. And I keep saying that because it's been minimized to some extent, because we have things like in the introductory moments rather than them descending down from up above, which is always an easy first win for a round of applause from an awestruck audience. The divas are just appearing on stage. They are just, just there. They never fly throughout the show and they don't have any costume changes. And I'm sure that the producers of this show and the creatives involved will take issue with me using the word cheap, because I know it's not cheap. Unfortunately, that's how this production is making it look to an audience, an audience who also knows that their tickets aren't cheap. And that is where we begin to have problems. And over the years, I have seen Priscilla shrink down a little. I have also seen the impact that that has had on the bus. I have seen the buses themselves get smaller and less and worse. But thankfully, some version of a bus has made a return for this tour. It is technically a static set piece that needs to be pushed around, that is revealed by turning it. And it's got like steps and a stage on the other side. We realize when the bus is first unveiled that we've been looking at the back of it for some time without realizing, which is again, not particularly awe inspiring. I don't know that this is a bus that will necessarily draw applause in the same way previous buses used to. It also doesn't have a lot of high tech capabilities. So when they paint the bus, if you know, you know, during the song Colour My World, of course, they are literally painting a couple panels of it to paint over some offending remarks that have been left there in an act of homophobic vandalism. And so it's just a portion of the bus that then becomes pink. Other bus adjacent problems, and there are unfortunately bus adjacent problems, include there not being a shoe atop the bus. So Adam still performs the operatic lip sync section in a silvery outfit with a draped piece of fabric. And if there's not gonna be the shoe, I start to wonder why we even bother to retain this in the show, other than to cover a costume change for other characters. But a far bigger problem, and I have no idea why there isn't some kind of an opening at the back of the stage behind where the bus is positioned, is that we see characters go into the bus via the door and then in the darkness at the back of the stage, have to run across in order to go and do a costume change and then run back. And they're meant to be going into the bus to go and sleep for the night. And so they do this very peacefully, and they allow a little tender, romantic scene to play out on the front of the stage, except we can see running drag queens. And there is nothing unsubtle. Let me tell you about a drag queen at pace. And it does somewhat undercut the emotional sincerity that we're trying to establish, I'll say that much. The set and lighting has been designed by Andrew Exeter. The set is largely an adaptable one, and he's doing his best, I think, with the lighting, in order to cover the limitations of the set. And it's punchy and dynamic and it's, you know, functional. We get from A to B. I don't know that we feel necessarily. This is a comment both on the design but also the direction, as though we are journeying from one place to another. I don't know that we feel quite enough distinction between the different locations and the towns that they arrive in. If you miss the line that Bernadette has when she says, at least they had a Kmart in Broken Hill, there's a woman out there wearing her best piece of corrugated iron. I don't know that you would gather that one town was meant to be any worse than another. And there is a screen on the upper half of the stage that has these sort of colorful graphics occasionally going across it, but we never have anything amounting to a map and a little bus and a little pink line as it charts its journey across the country. And so it's also hard for an audience who don't know Australia super well, which includes me, to figure out just how far they've traveled and how big of a trip this is. And as much as there is to say about set, there is plenty more to say about the costume design by this Vicky Gill. And I think audience members arrive with an awful lot of expectations when it comes to costumes. In Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, there is so much drag. There are these vibrant characters, and the costumes from the film are iconic. The same costume designers, the, I believe Academy Award winning costume designers recreated a lot of those and expanded on those designs for the stage. And they were always incredibly whimsical. And the drag outfits were playfully cobbled together. There's an iconic dress made out of flip flops and these big foam headpieces and giant dancing paintbrushes and giant dancing cupcakes and this very specific drag aesthetic that other performers have recreated and can always be connected back to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It is an iconic and specific look that this production of the show doesn't really try and, and emulate. However, for moving to a more sort of just generic drag style, it's not as though it's an improvement on drag. If this is drag they're meant to be bringing with them from Sydney to Alice Springs, it's not particularly good drag. They're still wearing like cheap tassely wigs and green marching band helmets and undergarments. When Bob comes in backstage to be like, wow. And have a moment and be struck by how beautiful they are when objectively, you know, not, not, not the greatest time to walk in and say that. And the problem is that the drag neither looks sourced from nearby materials nor good enough not to be. It's sort of, I mean, it's not even Drag Race Season 2 and they were wearing some nonsense in Drag Race season two. Sadly, the costuming for our leading drag characters is just not quite glamorous enough. But there are also problems with the ensemble costuming because it doesn't live up to the dancing paintbrushes or the dancing cupcakes. We have sort of pale imitations of each of those ideas. And Matt Cole's choreography, as always, brings vibrant energy to those production numbers. But if you don't have the budget to make giant paintbrushes, or if you don't want to simply try and replicate what's been done before, then innovate, do something different. Be resourceful. Don't just be a slightly blander, smaller version. And whatever you do, don't give me a dragged out ensemble wearing Doc Martin shoes. The creative misfires on this production of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert can, I think, be summarized by us going from Plat elevated heels to Doc Martens. And one other detail that I'm afraid I couldn't get past was the number of different occasions when we had the ensemble boys dressed in sleeveless plaid shirts in order to portray a dangerously rough group of heterosexual men. And I'm sorry, but the way that those ensemble boys were being costumed, they never once read straight on stage. I was Also wondering why Shirley came in, why she looked peculiar, why the wig looked the way that that it did, why she had the same sort of half mask that a lot of the actors wear in this show in order to achieve quick transformations between eye makeup, because you can't, you know, change in and out of drag makeup that quickly for some of the very quick changes that they have. And I realized it's because again, we are cutting back on the sides of the company this time because Shirley is dual cast as one of the three divas. Which of course brings us to a conversation about the cast. Now, here's the good news, which is that I think this company is stellar and I am thrilled to see authentic casting in the role of Bernardette. For years I have been talking about this and saying that this role is not really being cast appropriately, that we should stop casting CIS men to play trans women on stage, on screen, that it has real world ramifications. I know not everybody agrees with me, but I think the benefits of casting men it appropriately and authentically. And I have even said for years, Adele Anderson, cabaret icon, member of Fascinating Aida, would be perfect for this. The benefits can really be seen in this production, particularly in the scenes with Bob. And by the way, did I realize I was seeing Peter Duncan on stage? No. No, I did not. But the softness and the sentimentality and the genuine warmth of those scenes, I think now plays really beautifully with those performers. And Adele is a fantastic Bernadette. All of the withering one liners, the maternal qual, the softening in the relationship between her and Adam, who initially is a little rat bag to her. And the two of them are real adversaries, constantly hurling insults at each other from one end of the bus to the other. Now, speaking of Adam, he is usually played in this production by Nick Hayes, who is reprising his performance from the last tour. Only on Monday night, when I saw the show, I saw the understudy for the role, Finon o', Carroll, who is an exciting young performer whose career I've been following for a couple of years. And I do think this is a role that really works when you have a dynamic, vibrant, exciting young talent who brings energy to the stage, leading those company numbers. Leading the initial reveal in Venus, Finan does a great job with those. His execution of the choreography is sharp, but his portrayal of the character is also so brilliant. He has this real understanding of who Adam is and the vulnerability that eventually emerges after all of the bravado and the flirtation, graciousness and the constant attitude. His perhaps even may have been the defining performance of the evening for me. So you are in luck if you get to see Finnan on tour. Tic Mitzi, meanwhile, is played by Kevin Clifton in what I think may be his strongest musical theater role yet. He has been moving into this world, and he is convincingly playing gay. He is convincingly playing Australian. He is convincingly singing this score. I'm surprised there aren't more opportunities that they have found for him to show off his dance talent. Obviously, we first became acquainted with characters, Kevin, as a dancer, as a professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing. And there are moments, especially like MacArthur park in the second act, where you would have thought they could have him front this production number, rather than, as Tics usually do, just kind of weave their way in and out of it. And honestly, I think if they did, it would give MacArthur park slightly more of a reason to exist in the show. Like, I enjoy the song. And it's always a big punch line at the beginning when he first sees the cake left outside and is like, I've been waiting my entire life for this. Someone left the cake out in the rain. Big laugh. And then the song carries on for, like, another three minutes. And eventually you just kind of question why it's still happening. That is one of many songs where the vocals are provided by the Divas. They are Leah Vassal, Bernadette Bangura and Jessie May. They are fantastic. They each sound sensational. They each get solo opportunities. Leah in particular giving D. VA attitude. Choreography. Now that they're not flying, they've got to move around a little bit more and dance a little bit. And she's a former Six Queen, so I would expect nothing less. But all of them sound sensational, which is what they're here to do. James Wolstenholm does a great job of kicking us off like a confetti cannon towards the beginning as misunderstanding. And there are brilliant standout talents in the ensemble, particularly Jack Allen Anderson, who is a fantastic dancer and also portrays young Bernadette in a flashback. One of the other brilliant writing moments in the show when they give us a lip sync to a fine romance. Honestly, I can never stay mad at any production of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert that I has this stronger cast. So those have been my thoughts about the show. The question emerges, who do I think should go and see this show? And if you have any inkling that you would enjoy the musical Priscilla Queen of the Desert on stage, I would encourage you to go and see it if you've seen it before. And you share some of my concerns and my fatigue around the notion that every time a show comes back on tour, it's always going to be a little bit less, a little bit smaller, a little bit reduced. Then, you know, go in knowing that, set your expectations. And I think in spite of all of that, you will still have a fantastic time. It remains a great show, the cast are doing a great job. There are some interesting creative choices that bring it closer to the film than I think the stage production has ever been. And if you're a fan of the material and a fan of that movie, I think that that will be something that you can enjoy. In any case, as I so often say, go and see it for yourself and make up your own mind and then come right back here and let me know what you thought in the comments section down below. Of course, if you've seen it already, then you can already do that. Share your thoughts with all of us about Priscilla on tour. For now, thank you so much for listening to my review. I hope that you enjoyed and if you did, feel free to subscribe here on YouTube for many more theatre reviews coming soon or follow me on podcast platforms. I hope, as always, that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.