When their bus is vandalized by a nasty piece of anti-gay graffiti, the three drag performers in the 1994 film “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” cover it up with a coat of paint.
By contrast in the 2011 Broadway musical version, they cover it with thousands of little flashing pink bulbs, like the lights of a marquee, while the ensemble costumed as paintbrushes parade in front of the bus to a disco hit sung by three dangerously-coiffed divas standing on top of the bus next to a huge silver, spangle-encrusted patent leather Manolo Blahnik. (Smaller copies of this shoe are for sale in the lobby of The Palace Theater, along with boas available in both pink and purple. )
The lights on this bus change in the subsequent musical numbers of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert The Musical” from flashing pink to flashing blue, to flaming red, to flashing lime green with splashing red, yellow and blue polka-dots, to various pulsating rainbow and star patterns. One Brian Thompson is credited in the program for “Bus Concept & Production Design.”
What can you say about a Broadway musical in which the performers are often upstaged by the lighting?
How about: Never mind the lighting, look at the costumes. There are more than 500 of them, created by the same designers who won an Academy Award for their costumes in the movie, Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner; Ms. Gardiner’s the one who famously accepted her Oscar wearing a dress made entirely out of American Express gold cards. The costumes in the musical are often whimsically garish, some looking like steroid-enhanced refugees from “Alice in Wonderland,” others like “The Village People” with money to burn, many distinguished by headgear nearly death-defying (or at least neck-straining) in their towering height.
Is it possible to find this excess entertaining? Yes. But you must arrive armed with the proper expectations:
1. Do not expect the movie.
2. Do not expect to be moved.
3. Do not expect the cutting edge, but be tolerant of calculatingly naughty jokes.
4. Think of the show as a party, not a play. Go with a group – maybe with your girlfriends from the office, treating it like a night out at Chippendale’s, or with survivors from your misspent youth, exercising your right to nostalgia.
The plot of movie and musical are more or less the same.
Tick (Will Swenson) is a “gender illusionist” who goes by the stage name of Miss Mitzi Mitosis, and who in a moment of youthful indiscretion married a woman, Marion, and fathered a child with her. His son Benji, now six, wants to meet him. Marion, the owner of a casino in a town called Alice Springs, which is in the middle of the Australian desert, says, yes, come, meet your son, and I’ll hire you to perform a floor show.
So Tick enlists Bernadette (Tony Sheldon), an aging transsexual, and Adam (Nick Adams), a catty muscular Madonna-lyte who performs as Felicia. They get an old bus, name it Priscilla, outfit it in the style to which they have become accustomed, campy, and make the trip through the desert, encountering some rough characters on the way.
What is missing from the musical is the movie’s vast expanse of Australian outback, the astonishing barren landscape that establishes at a glance the amusing contrast between the hard-scrabble life in the desert and the sometimes poignant efforts of the three cosmopolitan performers to live a life of glamor, or at least glitter. That the characters do not actually live the life they would like to is something of the point of the film. In his review of it, Roger Ebert saw its “real subject” as “the life of a middle-aged person trapped in a job that has become tiresome.”
But for all the tawdry jokes and fabulous tackiness, the glitz and glamor of “Priscilla” the musical is real – there is a real star behind the show, first-time Broadway producer Bette Midler (who has possibly learned the lessons of Las Vegas too well), there are big bucks behind all those costumes and lighting and the twice-nightly delivery of glittery confetti upon the audience’s head. The performers aren’t a makeshift drag act in some casino in someplace called Alice Springs; these are top-tier talent playing the Palace on Broadway, baby!
There are 27 cast members, all of them hard-working, some of them in terrific shape (as we are allowed on numerous shirtless occasions to see.) The stand-out actor is Sheldon, who has been with this musical since its origins in Australia five years ago. Will Swenson, who was Berger in the recent Broadway revival of “Hair,” and Nick Adams, who has performed in five Broadway shows before this one, from “Chicago” to “La Cage Aux Folles,” are clearly accomplished performers, surely with stellar careers ahead of them. But the point doesn’t seem to be the acting — the characters — nor even the dancing; Ross Coleman’s choreography is uninspired. It is the spectacle…the energy…and the music. Stand-out singers are of course The Divas (Jacqueline B. Arnold, Anastacia McClesky, Ashley Spencer) who often do their belting hanging from the ceiling.
The songs of the movie have been expanded to 26, none original, all pop hits that are irresistibly catchy, even the irritating ones. Unlike other juke box musicals like “Mamma Mia!” or “Rock of Ages,” the songs often have only the most tenuous connections to the so-called action, but they have the benefit of being an eclectic mix that expands far beyond hits from the discotheque era of the 1970′s – “It’s Raining Men,” “I Love The Nightlife,” “Go, West,” “I Will Survive” — to include familiar tunes from Madonna to Elvis, and even Jerome Kern’s “A Fine Romance” (which was also in the film) and John Denver’s “Thank God I’m A Country Boy.”
Oddly, it is only during Denver’s song, the only country music melody in the musical — performed by the denim and overall-clad denizens of the Outback — when select members of the audience are invited up to the stage to dance. Despite the disco ball that assaults us with its light from the outset, it is as if the creators of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” didn’t believe in disco.
Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical
at the Palace Theater
Book by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott, based on the Latent Image/Specific Films Motion Picture, distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., written by Mr. Elliott, produced by Al Clark and Michael Hamlyn; directed by Simon Phillips; choreographed by Ross Coleman; music supervision and arrangements by Stephen (Spud) Murphy; production supervisor, Jerry Mitchell; bus concept and production design by Brian Thomson; costumes by Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner; lighting by Nick Schlieper; sound by Jonathan Deans and Peter Fitzgerald; orchestrations by Mr. Murphy and Charlie Hull; music coordinator, John Miller; music director, Jeffrey Klitz; technical supervisor, David Benken; production stage manager, David Hyslop; flying by Foy; makeup design by Cassie Hanlon; associate director, Dean Bryant; associate choreographer, Andrew Hallsworth
Cast: Will Swenson (Tick/Mitzi), Tony Sheldon (Bernadette), Nick Adams (Adam/Felicia), C. David Johnson (Bob), James Brown III (Jimmy), Nathan Lee Graham (Miss Understanding), J. Elaine Marcos (Cynthia), Mike McGowan (Frank), Jessica Phillips (Marion), Steve Schepis (Farrah/Young Bernadette) and Keala Settle (Shirley), and Jacqueline B. Arnold, Anastacia McCleskey and Ashley Spencer (Divas).
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Ticket prices: $50.00 – $125.00
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Jonathan Mandell
Jonathan Mandell, who tweets as New York Theater, is a native New Yorker and third-generation journalist with diverse experience on newspapers, magazines and websites.He has ...
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