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BOOK REVIEW: ‘From Mohair Suits to Kinky Boots’ by Geoff Deane

Review by Eric Page

This is the glorious chatty, indiscrete, but always humble tale of life lived in every way possible, a winding collection of uproarious and often moving stories spanning 60 years of Geoff Deane‘s life (so far) pulled together and shared during lockdown in a series of very funny online vignettes.

Growing up in London as a clothes obsessed Jewish suede head in Tottenham dancehalls, via straight Bowie boy frequenting London’s gay clubs, gender confusion in Manhattan’s Studio 54, and on to huge career success as a screenwriter. This memoir, told in vivid detail with plenty of small touches to bring the stories to real life, is a joy to read.

Deane has had a remarkably wide set of experiences and careers, he’s been a kitchen porter at Jewish functions, flogged suits down Brick Lane market, sang in culty punk band the Leyton Buzzards then segued to a floppy-haired pop star in Modern Romance. In 1984 he penned gay anthem You Think You’re a Man? for drag icon Divine, wrote for The Face and Arena and is author of Kinky Boots, the Tony Award-winning Broadway stage show.

The book captures his audacious ride through life in the kind of candid detail that people often leave for posthumous memoirs, so it’s all the more fun to hear Deane’s sometimes bashful, always celebratory take on his own riotous experiences. He’s good at serving context, reflecting on his own behaviour, then and now, and being as respectful as possible to people who are dragged along in his steeplechase life, but it’s all about the laughs.

He writes in glorious London prose, cockney slang and Yiddish, he’s blunt but polished like a well-loved brass knuckleduster, throw in some Polari and an agile ability to record the vocal diversity of the communities he’s living in with a candid forthright manner and this man’s a charm. He’s the one you sit next to on the train and end up joining him for a drink or ten in a late-night dive bar in whatever town you end up in. This is British raconteur at its best, exploring class, culture, fame and infinite diverse fortune with humour.

Deane’s a rascal and knows it, he’s also fun and deeply kind and not adverse to stepping up when there’s some facing off to do. Skipping though this instantly recognisable world, he drops famous names like fag buts, but it’s the content of the stories attached which are the joy here. Not celebrity for the sake of it, but brazen, glorious, joyful living life.

The book made me laugh out loud and left me smiling, it’s such a good natured, positive romp and Deane’s the kind of mate we all need in our life. To keep us on our toes and remind us of the possibilities and opportunities that a little cheeky charm can bring our way.

This is a tale of a fortunate life, grasped and wrung out, told with self-depreciating humour by a man with some considerable insight into his own and the wider world’s bullshit, and is a splendid book.

Out now £8.99

For more info or to order the book see the publisher’s website here:

 

 

 

 

REVIEW: Everybody’s Talking About Jamie @ Theatre Royal Brighton

Review by Eric Page

Inspired by the true story of a young gay man banned from attending his prom in a dress, feel-good musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie has proved a hit on the West End since opening in 2017. This new tour continues the high octane engagement of the original show and tells the story of Jamie New, a 16-year-old, tall, different, shy lad who lives on a council estate in Sheffield, does his best to study, keep his friendships honest, be as true to himself as he can, and cope with the pressures of growing up gay in a single parent household. Jamie knows he’s different, but grasps that that is power unfocused, and although fearful of what the future might hold, he knows, just knows, that he’s going to be a sensation.

As the story unfolds and prom at school gets closer, we see him blossom under the careful mentoring of Loco Chanel, a believable portrait from John Partridge of a lost drag act and drag mother. The unconditional love and support from Jamie’s brilliant, loving mum allows him to dream, but also protects him from harsh truths he needs to learn to grow. Surrounded by his friends, and family friend Ray (Shobna Gulati) – a fierce female warrior and virtual co-parent for Jamie – he overcomes prejudice, develops into his full brilliance, finds his fierce drag heart, calls out and beats the bullies and steps out of the darkness, with careful intent into the spotlight he’s craved.

This is a coming of age but not coming out Jamie, who is already ‘out’ at the beginning, and very happy with that. The main narrative rubbed up against the experience of every queer person and gay man in the audience of which there were quite a few, along with some glamorous drag people of note, in and out of sequinned fabulousness. It’s a triumphant trumpeting of gender diversity, celebrating untrammelled queerness as the core of being.

It’s very soft focus in places, and the small-minded teacher, father and bullies don’t really get their comeuppance, but then it’s not their story, so being sidelined is perhaps the point. Jamie endures, grows, and becomes his authentic self. The tender friendship between outsiders Jamie and Pritti (Talia Palamathanan) give insight and emotional connection to this foundational teenage relationship. The relationships between a young queer man and the women around him who strive and sacrifice to nurture him, echo many of our own experiences growing up.

My companion commented on how the dancing was superb and really kept their attention. This a seriously slick troupe of lithe dancers who perform energetic dances of complex, contemporary, referenced dancing with real energy and pizzazz, the choreography from Kate Prince is to be celebrated along with the performers themselves. The wholly original music from Dan Gillespie Sells gives this musical its throbbing, steadfast engine, keeping the flow of tension, story, and resolution firmly under control.

Jamie is played with tenderness and modest conviction by Ivano Turco, the audience warming to them. Shobna Gulati turning in a polished, hard-as-nails, been-there-done-it, soulful Northern woman and landed the laughs flawlessly. Rebecca Mckinnis, the other main female lead as Jamie’s mother, keeps her emotional energy steady until bringing the house down and drawing the whole show together with her volcanic act two solo He’s My Boy, the standout moment of the evening.

The supporting cast are excellent, hopping on and off, with some decidedly camp cameos from the drag queens, it’s always a deliciously odd clash of culture – school musical and Priscilla Queen of Canal Street – but there’s much humour to be mined of this Northern cultural clash, its warm and welcoming heart always visible.

Full cast and creative list here

I felt curiously untouched by the emotional narrative of protagonist Jamie but was kept engaged and entertained by the energetic dancing and fast pacing of production director Jonathan Butterell working within the limits of this stretched fabric to make the very best of the talent on stage. The drag moments brought surreal relief, but also referenced some reassuring eternalness of queer cultures. I reflected on this generational musical of queerness, absorbed on mentoring and protecting each other, hidden in plain sight.

The glamorous audience and their friends loved it and sashayed out into the rainy October Brighton night bubbling with heart warming chatter, content with a show they’d enjoyed.

 

At Theatre Royal Brighton until Saturday, November 11. 

For more info or to buy tickets see the Theatre Royal Website here:

BREMF review: Battle Cry: She Speaks @ St Nicholas Church

Review by Lisa Newnham 

An  intimate lunchtime recital in ancient St Nicholas Church adding its own perfect ambience to this delightful music. The rain was pouring as we enjoyed the positioning of Helen Charlston mezzo-soprano and Toby Carr on the unusual theorbo. Balanced, the two of them they held us and the space entranced. This award-winning duo chose a programme challenging the 17th-century obsession with female abandonment and lament.

Photo-by-Andrew-Mason

The rich lyric tessitura of Charlston in her singing suited the combination of the melancholic lower tones of the theorbo, and this startlingly simple pairing of voice and instrument offered real insight into the emotional content of these pieces, bringing home the deeply personal narratives which are often diminished with more ornamented musical arrangements.

With new texts by Georgia Way, the voices of Boudicca, Philomela, Marietta and Sappho were brought into focus as we were asked what they might say today. When Charlston sang the thoughts of Sappho ‘Make my voice your Lyre, take my cries. In the honeyed night,’ the light bounced off the sandstone interior of the church and her sultry voice added its mellifluous depths to the doleful reflections of Carr’s flawless playing. They have been touring this programme for some months and you could feel the polished familiarity of both these superb musicians with the music.

See the full programme here.

Charlston added some informative asides as introductions to the pieces being performed, and reflected on the intensity of most of the music, with Carr offering some ‘palate cleansers’ of short pieces for his theorbo.

credit-Oscar-Ortega

Opening and closing with Purcell is a perfect sandwiching of familiar and well-loved music with Owain Park‘s newly composed and they flattered each other’s style. The contemporary pieces fitting in with their referencing of early music tropes and adding the proud, defiant, and seductive voices of these iconic female narratives. Although the event was called Battle Cry these were more often Angry Laments. Full event details here: 

With a light-hearted encore from Barbara Strozzi, it was an added boon to have a female early music composer included in this programme which illuminates the voice and theorbo as a modern-day musical pairing and brings it forward into the 21st century. What a delightful way to spend a Saturday lunchtime with the howling rain waiting for us, patiently, outside.

BREMF continues until October 28 with their wide-ranging exploration of early music themed events. To find out more or book tickets see their website here:

REVIEW: ‘The Whispering Dome’ by BREMF

Review by Lisa Newnham

This was a great idea and an ambitious project bringing together many different disciplines, voices, and instruments along with younger people from local schools. Although promoted as a multimedia this was in effect a screen at the back of the stage with projection, which changed throughout with different images, maps and edited video snippets. The main narrative being the emigratory path of the nightingale.

The migration was suggested via the screen – we see a map, then the bird outline flies to different places, and when it alights, we had a piece of music associated with that place. We started on a simple farm in Norfolk, then set off; the flight following our birds out of Sussex with music from the medieval Lewes Breviary; across France with Clément Janequin’s wonderfully quirky Le chant des oiseaux; through Spain and Portugal with the extraordinary Lamentations by João Lourenço Rebelo; before pausing at the interval and then leaping across the sea to Morocco for fabulous traditional songs about birds; and finally settling to The Gambia and the stunning music for voice and kora belonging to the ancient Griot traditions.

The nightingale was called Billie, some of the music had bird associations, whilst drifting off to some rather delightful lamentations: ‘Forest fires south of Lisbon on the way to Cádiz’. I reflected how little regional texture there was in the early European music selection. I felt it lacked a national topographical distinction to the musical pieces selected, I could follow the geography of the migration through the projection and programme, but this distinction felt lacking in the music itself.

At the beginning, before the bird sets off, children from Elm Grove and Westdene Primary schools formed a children’s choir, performing a fun song created by director Jeremey Avis called Eating Worms. It seemed as if half the audience were parents of the younger people as there was surge of phones to video the moment. It’s good to see children included in an early music festival event and BREMF are to be applauded for engaging with this audience and demographic in this authentic and inclusive way. This was a fun way of ensuring a family event involved younger peoples having positive experiences of early music.

Later on the children joined in the call with the African performers; Simo Lagnawi, representing Morocco, playing the guembria three stringed skin-covered bass plucked lute used by the Gnawa people, the size of a guitar, with a body carved from a log and covered on the playing side with camel skin. Joining them in this bouncy ‘call and response’ was Suntou Susso playing the Kora – a harp-lute with 22 strings – which is unique to the Mandinka people of West Africa and The Gambia.

These stunning musicians with their unique instruments along with two different choirs, and a quartet – Horizon Voices stepped in and out of the performance spaces mixing and exchanging tempos, rhythms and ambience before they came together just before the interval in an emotive newly commissioned piece called Two Weeks. The whole company came together to sing, summing up an idea of human migration and movements of people. The music here was effective and moving, bringing a range of voice and experience to the stage all at once.

Abruptly the visuals changed into startling images of African refugees and migrants wrapped in silver blankets being ‘tended to’ by Europeans. I felt there might have been a more subtle and powerful way of presenting human migrations across the Mediterranean. The sheer desperation and hardships of refugees can not be usefully represented by such ‘stock footage’ that we see on the news, and which itself contains a subtext which does not respect the dignity of such struggles and the people that undertake them. After all, nightingales and humans have migrated for thousands of years – Billie the bird knows no borders and nations are a human invention.

You can see a full list of cast, creative and the music performed in this evening in the programme here:

Brighton Community Choir joined in to sing specially create music for the event. It was good to hear such a wide range of voices and different choirs taking part – it made the whole event feel like a well-developed community event. The different types of early music contrasted well with the traditional instrumental music from Africa, interlaced with commissioned pieces of music from composer and director Jeremy Avis

The African performers and musicians were a real highlight of the event, lifting the whole performance and shifting the Eurocentric focus of many early music events and reminded us that these traditional instruments have been in use widely as long as European early musical traditions. It felt like a successful family-oriented melding of BREMF and WOMAD.

Lagnawi and Susso interacted exceptionally with the younger members of the ensemble and injected real energy into the performance bringing to life the ‘call and response’ and giving the younger people an opportunity to take part in something special with internationally renowned musicians.

This was an ambitious community event with much to celebrate and enjoy with a few areas which could have been more polished, with clearer journey and native avian narratives.

BREMF continues across the city until the end of the month and you find out more, and book events on their website here: 

REVIEW: Secret Byrd @ BREMF

Secret Byrd

Friday 13 October

St Bartholomew’s Church

BREMF

Brighton Early Music Festival

 

Review by Lisa Newnham

Director, writer, and composer Bill Barclay – Artistic Director of Concert Theatre Works brings a mediation into belief and the sacred via an immersive staged Mass celebrating the 400-year legacy of William Byrd in the vast vaulted spaces of St Bartholomew’s Church.

England’s finest composer was a covert Catholic facing brutal prosecution, this performance offers us Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices as he intended: sung for private worship in strictest secrecy. The Gesualdo Six and Fretwork collaborate for the first time in a theatrical seance by candlelight.  This new work invites secular and religious audiences alike to commune with some of the most ravishing music ever written, recreating the music (and the spiritual intensity) of forbidden Catholic worship at the height of England’s golden age.

Lit by real candles, not electric candles, offering up an immediate authentic ambience. You cannot replace the smell, warmth and authenticity of candle lit space with a battery flickering. The purpose of this event to catapult you back into the 16th century.

Singers dressed in period costumes move about the space, with one greeting us to explain and welcome us into this experience to be shared. There are olde text panels from the director exploring the narratives arranged around the church space allowing people to wander and learn at their own pace.

In the middle of the space a dais with a round table is set up like a dining table, this is where most of the ‘action’ takes place. The music is from viol consort Fretwork who are arranged in front of the huge marble alter in St Barts with the singers slowly moving around the space, holding candles, with their voices coming from different directions.  We are thus very close to the singers, an utterly magical feeling, right in the middle of these supreme refined polyphonic harmonies, and can clearly hear them all flowing, folding and coming together.

We sat, silently in awe of the candlelit thrill unfolding around us.

It’s clear that the secret mass would have happened somewhere perhaps more intimate than the echoing halls of St Barts, but the singers produced a sense of intimacy by being so close together that we are drawn in and feel private and collaborating. What we may have lost in intimacy we gained with the whole of the huge acoustic space of St Bartholomew’s ringing with their pure harmonic tones and end notes just hanging in the air, as if the whole immense space was vibrating with their sounds. Divine.

The mass is reenacted with Owain Park director & leader of the The Gesualdo Six singers dressed as the priest, and although there were moments where the acting may falter, it’s carried totally by the shimmering brilliance of the music and singers. They are captivating, assured and project heavenly voices into the space.

Photo by Mark Allan

While they sit and sing around the central table, members of the audience, women and men, are invited up to the table, this extends the feeling of an intimate mass. At one point everyone up at table hold hands whilst the ensemble sing.

I felt that this invoked the quiet mystical oneness of a mass, the sacred mixed carefully with the performance and allowing the dignity of the mass to lay alongside the beauty of the entertainment.

The profound foundational bass and shimmering stratospheric counter tenors made me catch my breath, but here all the singers and musicians are on point, pulling this music out of history and breathing into it a deep sense of life.

Suddenly there was loud banging on the doors, loud, intimidating, all the candles are blown out. We are discovered, we are exposed, and we understand how forbidden and dangerous this perfect musical observation would have been to those attending it.  It’s a defining moment. Silence falls, the audience whispering, director Barclay cunningly evokes the perilous reality of the times.

Sacred things are cleared away quickly, but the singing gradually continues with the candles  flicking to life around us.

This delightful dramatic and semi-promenade performance is a superb way of introducing the history and beauty of early music in its historical context. If you were new to BREMF (or early music) last night was a fantastic introduction to the quality of the music, where you get to experience not only how ethereal this polyphonic singing is, but where and how it developed its sense of tranquillity.

Some of the audience, who had pre booked, received steaming bowls of soup and bread on trays brought out by the singers, all adding to the sense of intimacy sharing.

The Secret Mass is an example not just of music historically underlying spiritual belief but of  performance supporting the ability to suspend belief and feeling an understanding – from a secular perspective – of the tremulous insubstantial elements of faith, just as the notes lay shimmering in the high ethereal vaults of St Barts.

The Secret Mass was a  beautiful opening gig to BREMF presented in an accessible and interesting setting, with this sacred music made tangible, illustrating the historical context of this music.

We left rearranged inside, grounded but also up in the air and floated out into the autumnal air full of hope. BREMF have really brought a very familiar piece of music out into an audience made up of purists, and first timers, giving everyone something to sigh over.

Full programme, cast and creative list for Secret Byrd here

BREMF runs until Sat 28th October  see the full programme of exciting events on their website here.

There are almost always prom tickets held back for performance’s so check directly with them if you’re interested in going along.

 

 

OPERA REVIEW: Peter Grimes @ London Coliseum (English National Opera)

Review by Eric Page

David Alden’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s first major opera was last at the Coliseum in 2014, this second revival is a night of grim fascinations.

Taken from the Victorian poem The Borough by George Crabbe, the plot of Grimes is grim indeed, he’s a rough bully from a mean family without much sympathy and in the habit of ruthlessly beating his young apprentices. Britten reworks Grimes into a misunderstood loner; a strong complex individual against a closed, narrow minded, suspicious community, but he still beats the young men, they still die.

There’s been endless conjecture and analysis of the fact that this opera reflects the queer pacifist’s nature of Britten and his partner, but here it’s more about the small-minded closed nature of British small-town life and its brutal rejection of difference than about the freedom of choice and personal complexity. There is also the clear echoes of the whipped up culture wars, misinformed mob motivated by whispered gossip and rumours, the world – Britten’s world- gone mad.

Read the synopsis here:

©-Tom-Bowles

David Alden directs this dark and deep production as it swirls in the grey mists of some mean pinched post-war weary world. This is wide brush desolate fishing community, the set design from Paul Steinberg is rusty corrugated iron and hash lighting and the tight brutal focus is on the music and singing; everything is pared down, brutish and short.

Although flat and dull in materials, its lack of coloured detail makes it dramatically vivid. The textural lighting from Adam Silverman, and prim austerity palate costumes from Brigitte Reiffenstuel, drag the colour out of our eyes, beaching us in a claustrophobic but wide open landscape.

©-Tom-Bowles

Gwyn Hughes Jones as Grimes is lumpen, difficult, and overwhelmed by life, changing textures and volume of his singing to share the descent of Grimes into paranoia and madness, but he never fully convinces until the madness descends. His foil in Elizabeth Llewellyn as Ellen Orford is exceptional, bringing real life and a spark of individual reason to this world of conformity and non-thinking mob action and reaction.

Llewellyn’s sharp scalpel of a voice offering no soft spaces to hide from her truth, until it’s too late, then she sores – filling the auditorium, full of warmth and hope. Together, we know they are dammed but Llewellyn’s majestic acting keeps the ultimate conclusion from us with her complex and conflicted emotional attachment.

©-Tom-Bowles

Christine Rice as the creepy, mysterious lesbian Aunty is a crepuscular delight too, like a nightmare Aunt Sally, all rouge and roughish charm, her voice cuts to the quick of this opera and keeps us focused on the narrative tide as it flows and floods to its morbid conclusion. She holds the space and our eyes whenever on stage and her voice is as beguiling as the butch, lithe strutting. Ever-shadowed by her creepy hyper erotic nieces, danced hypnotically by Cleo Lee-McGowan and Ava Dodd, who appear to have slipped in from The Shinning and get a bit too much focus on occasion.

Veteran Anne-Marie Owens as opium addicted Mrs Sedley is the hissing judgmental voice of the mob, and is as nasty and unkind, and oddly vulnerable as the role allows.

All the solo Borough singers are wonderful, owning their cranky perverted characters, there’s not one weak voice among them and this casting provided a night of thrilling engagement with the audience.

The ENO chorus are worth swooning over in this production, their diction shrill and perfect, their movements as tight and nerve tingling as the singing and they bring a real sense of menace and fear to the night’s events. They are a human storm of contempt, each one clearly bonkers, they rise above the thin lyrics with harsh synchronised physical movement.

They snarl and jeer, catcall and howl their collective judgement on Grimes and all his supposed crimes against the town; I found them difficult to endure as they build to a terrible, vicious, vital mob. As a gay man, another outsider, this is a difficult opera to watch without squirming. They spat it out, all of them; it was terrific and terrible at the same time, quite a perfect piece of staging. I was aghast at them. Their hounding of Grimes is relentless.

©-Tom-Bowles

Martyn Brabbins is in full control of the orchestra; they are terrifying and majestic, powering through the music with energetic wrath. He weaves the complex musical tapestries of this music allowing the seascapes of Britten’s music to flow, the famous sea interludes welling up to shift direction of the story, his passionate conducting really makes the music shine. The full orchestra joining the cast on stage was a much deserved acknowledgement of their superb musical finery.

This is an astonishingly good revival and highly recommended. It all falls into place and makes this a utterly absorbing, unnerving but thrilling evening out at the ENO, not a fun one, but one which will leave you wide eyed and breathless and happy to live somewhere outside the world of The Borough’s thuggish folk. Walking out into a sparking wet St Martins Lane, the brooding crowds of a dark September night have never looked so grey or felt so dangerous.

I’m no fan of Britten but this production is a real winner on a number of levels, with the raw power of the ENO chorus to make this a breathless event of pure theatrical electrical energy, Book now, I said now.

Until 11th October

Tickets from £10, to book or more info or to book tickets see the ENO website here:

©-Tom-Bowles

 

 

BOOK REVIEW: ‘DRAG: A British History’ by Jacob Bloomfield

Words by Eric Page

One of the great joys of this book is the delightful stories unearthed, along with the academic rigour in the uncovering and presentations of some of history’s great drag performers. Mostly unremembered now, but enormously popular during their time, ‘national treasures’ in many ways and completely integrated into the life of the theatre and expectations of the paying public.

Bringing these wonderful characters, and their quotes, to our gayze is a joy and Bloomfield is to be danced around the block for taking such care to present these lives in context, while always keeping a shady focus on the drag, or female impersonation as it’s often been framed.

I loved reading about how in 1906, American drag entertainer and vaudeville star Julian Eltinge travelled to England, performing for an enraptured King Edward VII at Windsor Castle, or the Les Rouges et Noirs, the drag troupe composed of men who fought in the First World War and was the subject of the second ‘talkie’ film produced in Britain. The length of their performances, the love letters sent to them, their acts of heroism during the war, all delightful.

Drag was always a focus of public discussions around gender – from Victorian sex scandals to the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s. This book deftly demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness, contextualising its performers, while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage. It many examples of establishment drag performers a full bellied clarion call against those who would suggest drag is a modern phenomenon.

This wide, diverse breadth of drag performers and personas who appear continuously, without pause throughout British history from the early 17th century is testament to their popularity with the public. Even the great Wars of the 20th century couldn’t stifle drag, in fact it spurred it on to greater heights becoming a welcomed staple of wartime entertainment for the masses. Bloomfield emphatically shows us that drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture despite its transgressive associations.

The book takes us by the manicured gloved hand and chronologically leads us, via clubs, shows, scandals, politics, intrigue, to some rather delicious queer individuals and the way they used drag to succeed and flourish on stage whilst making strong pertinent socially informed humour a expected and publicly adored stage craft. The books opens with an evening at a Drag Revue in the company of the theatrical censor in 1958, giving insight into how the theatre was morally policed before the social revolutions of the 1960s. We learn about where and how performers flourish and how different the perceptions of men dressing up as women were from our current assumptions of Drag=Gay.

Danny La Rue, the Grand Celtic Dragosaurus, who dominated high camp via formal drag for decades, a sailor from Cork who reinvented himself as 7ft of ostrich feathers, lamé, sequins, and heels and ended up with his own club, shows, TV specials and the longest running panto in the world. Oh yes, he did! All the while pursing his immaculately lippied lips and ‘tutting’ at the ‘permissive society’ appearing around him.

The very short final chapter of the book looks at radical drag and how that’s been reclaimed by queer and gay communities.

Let’s make it clear that this is a British book about British drag and British entitlement and British privilege and a mighty bit of research it is too, the whole of the last third of the book is taken up with notes to all the chapters, bibliographies, index etc. However, the care taken on uncovering and compiling the glorious performers shared within its covers more than makes up for its learned presentation. The choice of font is also on the small side. Choices….

This is a great history of drag in the UK, both comprehensive and hugely informative, sharing not only wonderful stories and revitalising almost lost performers but also politically and sociality contextualising drag and empowering us to make informed observations about the current toxic and utterly fabricated ‘moral panic’ about drag today.

For anyone absorbed in the UK’s relationship with men dressing as female facsimiles for entertainment, this will be the go-to book; for those of us looking to spice up our conversations with delicious almost implausible and sometime jaw-droppingly camp info about drag in days gone by it’s pretty cool poolside reading.

Out now in Hardback, £25. 

For more info or to buy the book see the publisher’s website here:

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Gaudy Image’ by William Talsman

Words by Eric Page

An American queer classic, originally published in Paris by the legendary Olympia Press in 1958 to avoid US and UK obscenity laws and faded out of reach the last 30 years, The Gaudy Image is an important “lost” gay novel. Looking at the way that gay, queer and bi men and gender non-conforming working-class men lived in and around New Orleans through the lens of the Rococo prose of its passionate protagonist, ‘Tit’.

It has a curious vintage feel, in language, social intercourse and setting, like Rebel without a Cause but ‘Queer without a Hope’. It features a colourful cast of louche, some so laid back they’re virtually horizontal, others tightly wound up decadent ne’er-do-wells, but all characters who have something to love about them.

We get to know them and the places they hang out, the bars, flop houses, boarding rooms, and back rooms where they live out decadent lives, grasping at snatches of love and relationships in a word set hard against them.

The story follows Titania, queen of the fairies, aka Thomas Schwartz through the backstreets, bars and clubs as s/he moves from lover to lover, rake to fool, abuser to loser, trying to find the elusive ‘Gaudy Image’, a kind of New Orleans Great Dark Man, the perfect lover, a masculine man who ‘knows what he wants’.

Tit’s internal narrative reads heady, hot and steamy, it reminded me of By Grand Central Station I Laid Down and Wept, it’s oddly beautiful, erotic and sensual without ever being exactly sexual, it’s all epic suggestion, clearly directed towards sex between men but rarely overstepping the boundaries of the pages of the times to explicitly state so. But we understand, those of us who know how to read.

Tit knows how to read, in all senses of the word, and rarely misses an opportunity to share opinion and insight into the men who live with and around, sometimes off her/him. This is breathless prose, which speaks of steamy bayous, sub-tropical heat, suffocating intense secrets, and sweaty assignations, it’s grab it while you can, tooth and claw raw abandonment to the moment. Tit’s narrative is sultry, sweet, peachy, their voice beguiling sweet like honey, distracting from the omnipresent sharp sting of reality.

We follow their torrid adventures in love and lust, they are always funny, sometimes caustic, brutally honest, other times teasing and batting heavy eyelids with faux innocence as we slowly understand the joke, but the humour is at the heart of this book and Tit’s narrative of thriving and surviving. Tit is a shaman of their time, shape-shifting to suit the spaces.

It captures a hidden world, literally bobbing along just alongside 1950s America, a world where people see what they want to see, allowing queers to navigate the cracks and back alleys of a New Orleans happy to exploit them, just not acknowledge them.

The Gaudy Image is a sympathetic recounting of a community of queer (mostly) men, full of passion, care, insight and occasional bursts of shocking violence. It’s of it’s time, so modern notions of gender identity, queerness or femme/butch identities are somewhat removed, but at it’s core it echoes a fundamentally queer journey. The search for trust and love in a world walled by rejection, finding others like you, building a community.

The tenacity of Tit and her band of associated misfits to enjoy their lives in the face of disregard is magnificent.  It’s seedy setting uplifted by the glorious camp imaginations of Titania who can turn a dime into a diamond with a flick of her tongue.

Written by James M Smith a US writer and poet using the pseudonym William Talsman, Smith was one of the founders of modern gay literature. I was fascinated by this pre-Stonewall shard of LGBTQ+ life.

Out now: £8.99, paperback

For more info or to order the book see the publisher’s website here:

 

REVIEW: A Strange Loop @ Barbican Theatre

Review by Eric Page

There’s a lot of hype around A Strange Loop, its meta’ness, its centring of black, queer, fat experiences, and its vaunted shift from Broadway to London, holding a Pulitzer and latest Tony Award-winning Best Musical. It lives up to the hype and effortlessly surpasses the publicity and cant, using originality wit and tenderness to offer up an almost unique theatrical experience wrapped in a comforting familiar style. “I’m a musical,” it whispers; “it’s alright come sit and watch us sing”, but the characters are all self-aware, they know they are in a story; they understand they are “outsiders” and speak about how they are in this fictional story, they also know, in vertiginous meta’ness, that they are all figments of the writer’s imagination.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

Meet Usher played by Kyle Ramar Freeman: a black, queer writer writing a musical about a black, queer writer writing a musical about a black, queer writer…

A Strange Loop exposes a young black artist grappling with desires, identity and instincts he both loves and loathes. Hell-bent on breaking free of his own self-perception, Usher wrestles with the thoughts in his head, brought to life on stage by a hilarious, straight-shooting ensemble.

I’d read people complain about it being too American, but we see a lot of American culture on our stages and screens and its contextualised swiftly. So glorious to see so many black queer and global majority actors giving such superb performances. With a diversity of gender and masculine presentations given ironic, deeply camp flourishes in a fantastically funny way. Camp can be so dangerous in the right hands. This is an ensemble cast who excel, in voice, movement, acting and engagement, playing the whole team of characters between them, they are given huge range to impress, and impress each and every one of them do.

We lose the fourth wall in the first few lines, we are here on stage, in the now, but also in the mind of Usher, who, as we know, is writing about writing about writing about himself. O! He contains multitudes, many mansions in his house, all haunted by voices from his psyche. They are cruel, catty, sassy and funny, always funny. The six Voices form a Greek chorus of shifting sassy shade, folding themselves in and out of the action, layering observation, opinion and some devastating throw away lines in a blizzard of caustic verbal confetti.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

My white fragility was palpable, my discomfort with the language used on stage, shocked out of my British politeness default settings (even through my bold queer lens) and feeling challenged, but seen. It’s gloriously unapologetic, it don’t care what I think, it don’t need my approval, it don’t want my regret, it’s unremorseful, and probably the most thrilling musical theatre I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s bold and tender, shocking, and unutterably sweet, I ranged between wanting to cry and welling up with anger. I was moved.

The ever-moving cast dance across the stage with some wonderful choreography from Raja Feather Kelly, there’s not a move unweighted with meaning, I’d like to watch the whole thing again just to focus on the dancers, the music is not as complex as the plot and Rona Siddiqui serves us up some pretty generic light R&B, pop musical themes but still catchy and without cynicism.

Sometimes the drum sets were too emphatic and I lost lines from the quick fire repartee on stage. Jen Schriever’s simple lighting is superb, using the depth of the Barbican staging to change geometric spaces and pull focus on intimacies, moral grandstanding and full on holy-rolling madness working in close tandem with Arnulfo Maldonado’s subtle set designs which slide in and out, offering effective evocations of theatre, apartment, home and church… The reveal of the church is a theatrical eye opener!

Photo-Marc-Brenner

And then every now and again, as a good musical must, we get moments of calm reflections, moments where the audience are shifted and the mood steps up. A chance meeting with an audience member up from Florida brings full focus onto Usher’s problem, how to write about the hard stuff in life, family, love, death and wanting to be seen for what they are. The tender emotional shifts of this musical are done with grace.

A Strange Loop deconstructs what it is to be black, holds queerness up to the light, takes men on men sex apart leaf by shinning leaf, picks at intimacies’ scabs, breaks down walls around fatness, cuts family ties with laser precision, explodes faith with microscopic forensic relentless exactness. Oh its take down/shake down of evangelical Pentecostal prejudice is done with such amazing detail, movement, voice, biblical verses, charm, it’s spot on. I’d urge any of us queers, who spent any time under the cruel yoke of faith to go watch A Strange Loop, as an act of rebuking therapy. It was joyous. It never stops being funny. The humour underpins this musical from touching to cruel and savage, we are always offered the opportunity of a laugh.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

Usher’s explorations and reasoning about the sex he’s having, or not having, are placed in the queerest contexts: a sexual health clinic, dating apps and a hook up based around status and power play. A Strange Loop looks at the pressures on gay men, the toxic internet culture, the brutal interactions on apps, the erosion of boundaries in the pursuit of sex and the conflation of physical sexual contact with intimacy. It does it with a playful frankness that both shocks and makes you giggle. Usher sings of the hurt and regret he feels after a disrespectful hook up where he is demeaned and fetishised because of his size and race. This insight into ‘boundaries’ (the title of the song) being necessary to protect himself, emotionally, professionally and sexually moves the action along.

The interactions with Usher’s family are seriously funny, a slice of American black working class life, his family seem to reflect and use the names from The Lion King (the musical that Usher is working at, many layers up in this meta narrative). Each family member is given the light and mic, his parents have stand out moments which allow us to see their own lives in perspective, there’s no charity here though. Is it happening, is it memory, is Usher puppetting his family thought their trauma? We move on never really knowing what we’re looking at, but understanding we are always in Usher’s mind.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

The raw decades of frustrations, despair and anger that pour of Usher as he confronts his father about his queerness brought a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. Addressing his mother’s refusal to accept him as queer through a full-on Gospel Horror Show of Condemnation, Censure and Biblical damnation was breath-taking, a truly jaw dropping piece of theatre, writing and staging. When the full stage is revealed it’s a real WTF moment!

See the full cast and creative team here 

His mother’s deep love for him, entwined with her unbreachable religious homophobia, is brought to a head here, with his mother’s voices asking ‘why did you write me into the show this way if you loved me?’. His devastating response is that he wrote them that way because he loves them. There are many complex scenes with his mother: the struggle and damage of love and bigotry unresolved is given a compassionate but ruthless examination, we really really hope his mother has finally understood and accepted Usher. This reminded me of Torch Song Trilogy where Arnold confronts his mother about her disregard of his grief after the death of his partner.

At its core, it’s about a clever boy trying to make sense of a world which seems to deny him dignity, visibility, or respect at every turn. It’s about his struggles to find a place to carve out a space of love, of unconditional acceptance and basic humanity and it’s a full throated, 100% queer, glass breaking high note torrent of scalding camp rage, being allowed to run, lava hot out of a brilliant sensitive mind, rebuking those of faith in their own glossolalic tongues, reaching out across visual difference of skin colour, size, intellect and wealth to connect us all.

It ends without ending, does the Strange Loop continue, or are we watching the actual ending – the show’s success, from Broadway to London, are we outside or part of the ending, happening now? This last flourish and tease with theatrical expectations is just lovely.

A Strange Loop is different, it asked us to allow our difference to define us, it demands of us to see difference as normal. If we dare. It offers us hope in the face of despair, and it’s a radical hope.

I loved it, I’m not sure I understood it completely, the textures and experiences on offer are too different from my own lived experience, its meta’ness shifts it as you watch it, it’s mercurial, it supported my development of racial stamina, making me understand queer black experiences with clarity, and I connected with it on many many levels. I left confused, thrilled, and utterly delighted to have seen it.

It also passed my ‘was it a good musical test’ where you hear the audience hum or sing the songs as they leave the auditorium, and on the way down to the Tube.

I’d recommend you go see it, seriously go see it, it’s the best new musical I’ve seen in years!

A Strange Loop is at the Barbican until September 9. For more info or to book tickets follow this link to the Barbican Theatre website

Meet the Author: Redfern Jon Barrett @ the Ledward Centre tonight

This month’s ‘Meet the Author’ event, a free evening of sparkling wit and laid back conversation with Scene book reviewer Eric Page, is at the Ledward Centre this evening at 7pm. ( doors 6:30)

Meet the Author events see Eric pop an author on the sofa and chat about writing, books, queerness and inspiration. This month is the turn of deliciously decadent Redfern Jon Barrett whose book Proud Pink Sky breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia – presenting a vision of the world’s first gay state.

A glittering metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of Pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much we must sacrifice to find identity and community.

You can read the Scene review of Proud Pink Sky here

Redfern’s essays and short stories have appeared in publications including The Sun, Guernica, Strange Horizons, Passages North, PinkNews, Booth, FFO, ParSec, Orca, and Nature Futures. Born in Sheffield in 1984, Redfern grew up in market towns, seaside resorts, and post-industrial cities before moving to Wales to study at Swansea University (Prifysgol Abertawe). Redfern is non-binary queer and they have campaigned for LGBTQ+ and polyamory rights since they were a teenager. They currently live in Berlin.

Join Eric in the comfortable surroundings of the Ledward Centre for an entertaining evening of gentle probing and hear the author read from their book. There will be opportunities for questions, and you can even get your copy signed!

This event is free but ticked. Book your FREE ticket via this link

 

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