Writers: Trevor Ashley and Phil Scott
Director: Trevor Ashley
Many parodies arrive long after the original they lampoon, by which point the joke is cold, or the source has dwindled from memory. Trevor Ashley and Phil Scott’s Deep-Heat Rivalry, mercifully, comes at its target with the blood still warm and considerably engorged. This silly self-deprecating musical satire of Heated Rivalry is 75 minutes of self-proclaimed bad jokes and bad language, adorned with many a buttock, ribald reference and risqué embodiment of our national treasures.
Fans of the original – the Canadian ice-hockey drama that captured audiences over the past year – will recognise the premise: two rival players, one shy Asian-Canadian and one impassive Russian import, improbably (and graphically) entwined, in every way. Trevor Ashley and Phil Scott’s musical parody, tucked into The Other Palace’s Studio, does to that premise what a Zamboni does to ice: flattens, glazes and shaves away the surface, leaving it primed for a filthy amount of friction.
Sario Solomon’s Shane Hollandaise (playing for the Montreal Meatheads) and Jason Leigh Winter’s Ilya Stroganoff (Boston Beefcakes) make an excellent pairing. Winter’s implacable Russian deadpan lands in all the right places, while Solomon gives Hollandaise a squeaky earnestness. When they adopt female pseudonyms to hide their online… interactions, suggestions range from Thelma and Louise to Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy and Edina. Shane’s horror at being designated Edina, delivered in a run of ‘sweetie darlings’, is just one of many camp references.
The musical interpolations are gloriously stupid: Cher’s Strong Enough becomes ‘Stroganoff’, while Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam is delivered by Diana Vickers as Ilya’s Russian spy lover, dressed in a fur hat the size of a bearskin. Her accent subsequently migrates, quite accidentally, towards Scotland – a lapse she acknowledges to howls around the room. Vickers proves to be a weapon in this production, cycling through guises with a voice considerably stronger than warranted by a spoof. Her later tight-chested Céline Dion is marvellous, vocals uncannily close to Dion’s, until one challenging belt where she subverts to the lowest octave possible.
Throughout, Ross Chisari’s chiselled Puck presides over proceedings as both hockey puck and Shakespearean sprite. Naturally, his chest is bare and his lower half liberated by fishnets and chaps. He is pleased, as any puck surely would be, to spend his evenings knocked around by muscular men. Chisari competes with Vickers for the evening’s boldest sequence when he announces that the boys need a rest and commandeers the stage for an extraordinarily sexual interlude, aided (or perhaps emboldened) by an audience member of his choosing, and a banana.
Together, Chisari and Vickers almost steal the thunder from our ice-crossed lovers. Vickers’ Claudia Wink-at-them, blinded by her own fringe as to need a white cane, and Chisari’s zealous Graham Moron as hockey co-hosts are among the evening’s finest inventions. Yet the whole cast proves musically formidable in a parody of Islands in the Stream, so impressive that the comedy almost gets lost.
None of this self-aware send-up aims for subtlety, nor does it need to. Deep-Heat Rivalry commits to its stupidity admirably and, beneath all the bare flesh and denigration of British and American icons, contains considerably more wit than its trashy exterior might suggest. A puckishly filthy delight.
Runs until 11 October 2026
