Archives for March 22, 2011

I hated every second of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which I reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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If your idea of a good show is one in which the chorus boys are dressed up to look like cupcakes, confetti is dropped at 8:34 and “I Will Survive” is sung twice, read no further. “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” (no comma, please) is the musical for you. If, on the other hand, you have an old-fashioned yen for shows in which touching things happen to believable people and the songs have something to do with the plot, stay as far away as possible from the Palace Theatre. (Wyoming might be far enough.) Not only is “Priscilla” a sequin-encrusted dragfest without a heart, but it’s one of the biggest missed opportunities in the recent history of Broadway, a pointless musical version of a sweet little movie out of which something smart–and, yes, touching–might easily have been made. Instead we get human cupcakes.
Let’s go back to the movie for a moment. Released in 1994, “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert” told of how three drag queens, one of them an aging transsexual played, amazingly enough, by Terence Stamp, traveled across the Australian desert in a rundown motor home, looking for love in all the wrong places. Despite a few overly obvious moments, it was a modest and poignant film not unworthy of “La Cage aux Folles,” by which it was clearly inspired, and has since become something of a cult classic.
Turning “Priscilla” into a stage musical is so good an idea that one wonders why it took so long. But in doing so, Stephan Elliott (who wrote and directed the movie) and Allan Scott, who collaborated on the book, have leached out every bit of sentiment from the film, replacing it with brass-plated showbiz pseudo-feeling….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might also be said that nature is usually wrong.”
James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies