Camp show from West End boys

10 April 2012

A little theatre history was made last night when the first truly gay musical to be written and composed by Englishmen reached the West End.

Until now boy tended to meet girl in musicals and true love normally followed on at a decent interval, after each had poured out their hearts in song.

But in Closer to Heaven, which brings a rush of excitement and daring to London's musical theatre, boy meets girl and grudgingly realises his mistake when his eye and other vital parts are taken by a young male dope-runner.

For this musical, with songs and lyrics by the Pet Shop Boys and book by Jonathan Harvey, is caught up in the London club scene and life in the hard drugs lane. Its love scenes and songs are not what they used to be in the chaster days of Oklahoma! or Bless the Bride when pre-marital hand-holding was as far as you went.

Here the hero, who's called Straight Dave but not for long, slips into bed with the dope runner so they can sing Closer to Heaven; the words refer not to the gay London nightclub, but a little mutual bliss which they share under the covers. But there's no condoning of drug abuse at all. The hero's love affair is ruined when the Cockney dealer, Mile End Lee, dies of an accidental overdose of special K and after a fearful trip that's scarily rendered on film.

The show is primarily to appeal to hip, young audiences of West End clubbers of all sexual persuasions. For such frivolous under-35s who despise the sounds of old-fashioned musicals, Closer to Heaven should sing loud and alluring. The Pet Shop Boys' music played by just a three-strong band is simply beautiful, though the lyrics are nothing special.

The score maintains musical moods of repressed, romantic yearning and melancholia that conflict with the swinging action. Only in exuberant, camp showpieces when the stage is full of dancing, gold-clad girls in boots and briefs and bare-chester leathery, muscle-boys does the music go with a heavy, joyful beat. Es Devlin's gaudy stage settings are remarkable just for one spectacular flourish. A bed with occupants vertically fixed high on the back stage wall.

Harvey's sardonic slow-moving storyline is immersed in the doings and undoings of gay clubland and an immoral pop music business scene.

Straight Dave charts a typical career-line for a youth trading on his looks in gay publand. It's a cruel, competitive world according to Harvey, with predatory, older gay men like Paul Broughton's thuggish band manager while younger ones are bent on pleasuring themselves and each other. Frances Barber's endearing, interfering French hippie, with a sex-laden past behind her, is the one selfless person around.

Dave, having been taken on by David Burt's lecherous club owner and taken up by Stacey Roca as his equally smitten but sincere daughter agonises over his sexuality in the song Something Special, but discovers his true nature in that night of passion with Tom Walker's poignant doomed drug-runner. Gemma Bodinetz's production rather sanitises this unlovely milieu, with a colourful ensemble of vivaciously dancing athletic party-prone clubbers who keep letting their hair and costumes down.

But in this new-genre musical Paul Keating's Dave in powerful passionate voice forcefully stresses the importance of love over lust.

Closer To Heaven

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