The 2001 show CLOSER TO HEAVEN made #37 in my ongoing list of favourite musicals, primarily for the Pet Shop Boys score and for some of the performances in the original production. It had been meant to run from May till September 2001 but initial sold-out houses made the producers extend it to January 2002, however the subsequent negligible press reviews and declining audiences made them close in October. The cast recording remains a favourite with it's mix of PSB bangers for the club scenes and big ballads for the characters: the millstone around the show's neck is the facile book by Jonathan Harvey.
What made that original production memorable - despite the score - was the barn-storming performance of Frances Barber as the nightclub star Billie Trix. A legend in her own mind, Billie was a former leading light of the 1960s art scene who has ended up in a tawdry gay club, surviving on drugs and ego. She is such a memorable character - especially as played by Barber who seemed to be channeling Anita Pallenberg - that it is a surprise it has taken 18 years for the Pets and Harvey to revisit the character in a new show. MUSIK is Billie's latest incarnation, an hour-long cabaret based on her life -- which oddly doesn't include her referencing the CLOSER TO HEAVEN years.
Barber first appears cloaked, with an eye-patch - "Madonna stole my idea" - and a bizarre fascinator that looks like a bat mating with her head, singing the first of the six Pet Shop Boys that punctuate the piece "Mongrel" about her conception in the ruins of Berlin by a rapey Russian soldier and her teenage mother. After a minor folk hit in East Germany "Cover Me In Calamine", Billie escapes to the West and gains an entrée to Andy Warhol's Factory where of course she suggests he paint soup cans.
It's odd that what takes Jonathan Harvey and PSB an hour to do, Stephen Sondheim accomplishes in just over 5 minutes with "I'm Still Here" from FOLLIES as they are essentially telling the same story of careering "from career to career". Where they differ is Carlotta Campion is in on the joke, Billie Trix is too deluded to notice the appalling reviews and the insults: she proudly says her Mother Courage was judged "incomprehensible" or that Jean-Paul Satre found her pretentious.
So Jonathan Harvey sends his character rattling down the years like a bagatelle, through her art-house classic "The Masturbation of Race" where she played Norway, her disco years, her down and out years in London living in a Soho telephone box - shades of Marianne Faithfull and her drug years of sitting on a wall in St Anne's Court - and her friendship with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin who she met when Emin pissed up against her telephone box. That's kind of the level of Harvey's script which again is desperately thin but Barber makes bricks from his straw.
Once again Frances Barber inhabits Billie Trix like a possessed creature... growling and prowling the stage, chopping up lines and spitting out her lines between bawling like a fishwife or chuckling huskily to herself. I have to give it to her that she perfectly sang the Pet Shop Boys songs, husky and raw, making "Friendly Fire" and "For Every Moment" perfect anthems. It again illustrated the eternal question of whether you can separate the person from the performance. It was a close-run thing.
The PSB songs are fine for the show although ultimately they feel like b-sides cobbled together apart from CLOSER TO HEAVEN's "Friendly Fire" and the final song "For Every Moment" which is suitably anthemic. Director Josh Seymour just about kept the tension running through the hour - it dipped noticeably towards the end during Billie's 'telephone box' era.
I am glad I saw it - Neil Tennant attended the night we went with David Walliams - and the PSB songs are living on after I downloaded them, but Harvey's gossamer-thin contribution is fading fast from memory.
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