Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve answered one of life’s biggest questions: yes, it is possible to fall in love with this year’s hottest (in more ways than one) Broadway musical. Pricilla Queen of the Desert turns out to be queen of over the top laugh riots too. The story starts off on the stage of a small club in Sydney where some down on their luck queens are just trying to make ends meet doing what they do best. When our main character gets a call that will let him see his son for the first time he gathers the best ladies around and sets out through the outback to get to him in time. Everything about the show is charming and disarmed this reviewers critical eye after only a few rainbow filled numbers. Having never seen the movies I was introduced to the characters after a few (admittedly disjointed) intro songs and I fell in love with each instantly. They were dynamic and well thought out, they had chemistry with each other and the audience. The caracter dialogue is a bit gaudy but witty and well written, it quickly became a game just to find the sexual innuendo in every other sentence.
As for the stage production, there aren’t so many nice things to say. Many of the jokes early on during the road trip were lost because a failure in the conveyor belt like system that moved signs across the stage. It looked like they were trying to joke about the gang running over wildlife but we’ll never know because a stage hand had to hurry to take the motionless puppet koala away. This malfunction didn’t slow any of the glam though, women still sang from the rafters and the bus still drove up to the lip of the stage so close you could reach out and touch it (provided your in the front row). The show was nothing but eye candy from the immaculate sequence gowns to the dancing bedazzled paintbrushes, there was never a dull moment.
The real masterpiece of the show was the ending. The final duet between father and son brought many of the audience in tears. The glam only got bigger and the numbers reached a crescendo that would leave any other group of performers breathless. The show received a long standing ovation and I dont think there was anyone in the audience who would have rather been anywhere else. Seeing the performers leave the stage was one of the saddest things I’ve done at a theatre in a long time. Over the course of the show I felt like I’d grown close to the characters, we all did, and when the curtain went down it felt like saying goodbye to old friends. Overall the show is everything its cracked up to be, it’ll lighten the saddest day with rainbow glitter and enough fabulous charm to keep you smiling for a week.
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