MUSIK at Leicester Square Theatre - is it or isn't it?

We saw the very short run of MUSIK a few weeks ago, fresh from it's Edinburgh Festival debut and since then I have wrestled with quite a few questions - is it theatre?  Should I blog or not?  As it was only an hour long I will finish this off in a few paragraphs.

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.

50 Favourite Musicals: 37: CLOSER TO HEAVEN (2001) (Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life: 

First performed: 2001, Arts Theatre

First seen by me: as above

Productions seen: two

Score: Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe
Book: Jonathan Harvey

Plot:  Shell meets her gay estranged father Vic again at the club he owns, where she also meets Straight Dave an Irish bartender and Billie Trix, the club's star performer who is a druggy former pop singer and actress. Shell and Straight Dave start a relationship just as he is offered a place in a new boy band, but when Dave also meets Mile End Lee, Billie Trix' drug dealer, he finds himself falling in love again...

Five memorable numbers: FRIENDLY FIRE, MY NIGHT, POSITIVE ROLE MODEL, OUT OF MY SYSTEM, SOMETHING SPECIAL

Right this is tricky... how can this musical beat some good competition to get this place in my list when it has such a bad book?  Any fule kno that a musical needs a good book to hold the show together, no matter how great the score, and Jonathan Harvey's book is truly one of the worst.  It clatters along without any regard for creating even remotely interesting characters - maybe Billie Trix and Straight Dave at a push.  The worst offence is that the last quarter of the musical DEMANDS we understand the pain of Straight Dave when his young lover dies from a drug overdose but the character has had only a few scenes and is fairly two-dimensional - it's difficult to feel a character's pain when he only appears to have met his lover twice.  No, CLOSER TO HEAVEN is here on the basis of it's original production, directed by Gemma Bodinetz which, though hampered by the afore-mentioned book, had the benefit of performers who managed to create depth through their own personalities into the characters that the script refused to do.  Paul Keating as Straight Dave, Stacey Roca as Shell, Tom Walker - aka Jonathan Pie - as Mile End Lee, David Burt as Vic - who, when CTH closed early, simply jumped ship to TABOO, the other gay pop musical set in Soho clubland - and primarily Frances Barber, gloriously over the top as the Anita Pallenberg-esque Billie Trix.  The original production was only meant to run from May till September 2001 but initial packed houses made The Really Useful Company extend it to January 2002, however the shaky reviews and declining audiences made them think again and it closed in October.  If proof be needed to the galvanizing presence of the original cast, a 2015 revival at the Union Theatre was appalling; without the benefit of strong, charismatic performers with good voices, the plot made even less sense and even the Pet Shop Boys score couldn't rescue it.  The cast recording of the PSB score remains a favourite with it's mix of PSB bangers for the club scenes and big ballads for the characters: it is very noticeable that any character development at all happens through the songs and not through the scenes in the book.     

Well I think I have found out one good reason why it closed... there is no video recordings of the original production anywhere apart from this 47 second clip of Frances Barber, Paul Keating, Stacey Roca, David Burt and Tom Walker singing the opening number MY NIGHT (although the cast recording is dubbed over it).  Indeed, Neil Tennant bemoaned the show's bad marketing after it closed.  There is a YouTube video of the same number filmed from the back of the Arts Theatre but it's an awful transfer.  Hunt out the casting recording to get a better idea of the PSB score.

CLOSER TO HEAVEN is still out of reach

Since it's unsuccessful first run in 2001 I have often wondered when the Pet Shop Boys musical CLOSER TO HEAVEN would get a revival.  Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe's electronic score finds room for both their signature dance beats and their introspective ballads and I've played the original cast recording regularly over the years.

Despite showcasing a magnificent star performance from Frances Barber as the drug-addled Eurotrash hostess Billie Trix, the original production foundered at the Arts Theatre after 5 months with most critics pointing the finger at Jonathan Harvey's paper-thin book which fundamentally damaged the show despite the goodwill that the score and cast generated.

But now - and I might have guessed this would be the case - the enterprising Union Theatre in Southwark have revived the show and the fact that it sold out in a few days shows that I wasn't the only one wanting to see it again.  I had hoped that Harvey's book would be re-hauled for this second twirl round the go-go pole.  Sadly that is not the case - and it looks even more threadbare on the unadorned Union stage.

I suspect that this is also down to the equally threadbare casting.  Like the Bridewell Theatre in the 1990s, it's great to have a theatre which regularly stages musicals that otherwise would not be revived but it must be said that the shows are cast with performers from the second or third rungs of performers.  A scan through the programme mostly reveal understudies, fringe and regional productions, cruise ship performers or first-job from Drama School.  Now I know everyone has to start somewhere... but not the lead surely?

CLOSER THAN HEAVEN follows two young characters whose lives intersect at a Soho gay club run by Vic, a hard-drinking, hard-snorting self-confessed "vampire" who lives at night.  Vic's daughter Shell from a short-lived straight relationship makes contact with him after many years and they struggle to establish a relationship.  At the same time, the effortlessly sexy - and Irish - Straight Dave arrives looking for work as a bartender although he soon establishes himself as the club's lead dancer.

Shell and Dave are attracted to each other and through her job as a PA to a gay record producer Bob Saunders, Dave is lined up to be the new member of his boy band Up & Coming.  Dave warily keeps the nasty Saunders at arm's length but finds himself attracted to the surly Mile End Lee, a young drug dealer who supplies Vic and his temperamental Eurotrash hostess Billie Trix in drugs.

Vic tries to clean up his life and club to impress Shell but when he discovers Mile End Lee delivering a large drugs package to Billie, he fires her and confiscates it.  Shell sees Dave and Lee getting physical in the club toilet and she dumps him.  Lee and Dave have a night together but Dave later dies from a ketamine overdose.  Dave becomes a pop star in his own right.

The End.

All the characters are expertly introduced during the opening number MY NIGHT but after the interval, Harvey's anorexic book starts coming apart at the seams.  Vic, Shell and Billie are neglected midway through the second act as the spotlight is switched to Straight Dave and Mile End Lee who promptly dies which leads to the big eleven o'clock teary ballad FOR ALL OF US, but it's efforts to get the tear ducts working fail because we are being asked to care for a secondary character who has had minimal effect on our sympathies up until then.

The show's climax - Dave's ascent to stardom - is unexplained and is obviously there to end the show with an uptempo number - but in this revival, the original last number, the excellent Barry White-sampled POSITIVE ROLE MODEL is ditched for VOCAL, a track from the last Pet Shop Boys album.

Director Gene David Kirk plods through the troublesome second act relying on the lights, music and his seven-strong ensemble to bump their crotches - no hiding when you are in the front row believe me - and grind their bums to hopefully distract from the paucity of content.  Said ensemble are excellent by the way but sadly Owen pointed out the similarity in Philip Joel's choreography to the famous, embarrassing flailing-about of Westlife's first appearance on Irish TV.  Once pointed out I couldn't get it out of my mind.

As in the original production some actors made the most of what they had to work with.  Although a bit shrill, I liked Amy Matthews' Shell as well as Craig Berry's blokey Vic while Ken Christiansen made the most of the viperous Bob Saunders.  Praise too for Ben Kavanagh as Flynn, Saunders' bitchy assistant.

The main problem was in the performances of Katie Meller as Billie Trix and Jared Thompson as Straight Dave.  As I said above, Frances Barber created a wonderful sacre monstre that covered up some of the dodgy, fag-haggy type lines Harvey gives her and sang her big solo FRIENDLY FIRE with a world-weary sadness that was really stopped the show.  Sadly Meller just doesn't have the wattage to deliver, her casting is a complete mystery other than I guess she's affordable.

Jared Thompson was even more problematic.  Paul Keating played Straight Dave at the Arts and was believable as the sexually-confused new kid on the go-go box while also being charismatic enough to make you believe in the other characters' interest in him but Thompson appears to not so much act as point his lantern jaw, floppy hair and erect nipples at people.  There was another more irritating problem - I had to laugh when he lisped through the line "Why does everyone think I'm gay".  Because they have ears?  What made me truly baffled though was in Thompson's duet with Connor Brabyn's Mile End Lee in the second act, Brabyn showed he had an excellent, strong singing voice - how on earth was he not cast as the lead?

So there we are, CLOSER TO HEAVEN has been revived and it is still has problems.  Not the first time a great score has been allied to a weak book but all the more frustrating when you can see it's obvious potential.  I am guessing we might not see another production anytime soon.

PSB have been very supportive of the show which is good of them and Neil Tennant was actually in the third row at our performance - I was quite sanguine about it, I only looked round a handful of times!  Oh for the chance to question him about what he really thinks of it.

I have been playing the original cast recording ever since seeing it and believe that this show could be successful if they dropped Jonathan Harvey's script which has all the depth of a Boyz magazine comic strip.

Three months after CLOSER TO HEAVEN closed, Boy George's TABOO opened a few minutes walk away from the Arts and ran for over a year.  Both dealt with gay club culture, had a bisexual leading character and of course both had scores by artists who had come to prominence in the 1980s.  In retrospect I think why TABOO survived was down to a sympathetic, inclusive outlook which CLOSER TO HEAVEN ultimately lacks.  You simply don't care for any of Harvey's characters no matter how good the songs they are singing.