Book, Music and Lyrics: Dylan MarcAurele
Director: Alan Kliffer
Musical parodies of steamy mega-hit TV shows about impossibly buff ice hockey players falling in love are like proverbial buses. You wait ages, and then two come at once. At The Other Palace, Trevor Ashley’s Deep-Heat Rivalry has just had a well-received outing. Meanwhile, at Underbelly Boulevard Soho, it is time for Dylan MarcAurele’s Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody to take flight. TV’s Heated Rivalry gave queer romance the lavish treatment typically reserved for straight prestige dramas. MarcAurele’s 70-minute pastiche tells broadly the same story, adds camp, hummable songs, some decent jokes, and steers the piece firmly into romcom territory.
Shane (Zheng Xi Yong attacks the melodies with zest) is a straight-laced Canadian ice hockey player who drinks chicken smoothies, loves Broadway musicals and has an impossibly ambitious Mom (Sylvie Stenson). But, as the lyrics to a mum/son duet tell us, “there’s sorrow in his smile and a dildo in his drawer”, which is another way of saying he has a deep, unrequited passion for his brash, swaggering Russian competitor, Ilya (Joseph Dann with impressive vocal range).
The warring hockey stars finally bond over competitive Peloton in a hotel gym, before heading discreetly to Shane’s room. “I know that look, I’ve seen those eyes, those boys are about to sodomise”, narrator Susan (May Tether) tells us, as if we couldn’t work it out for ourselves. The boys fall into a routine of performative on-ice clashes and late-night, off-ice trysts. But will they move beyond heated rivalry to find something deeper and more meaningful, and do they even want to? Narrator Susan pithily sums up their conundrum: “they’re sucking dicks, but they’re sad”.
The barriers to love here are many. Ilya’s dementing, homophobic dad (Andrew Berlin in sparkling comic form) suspects something is going on and demands his son desist. Ilya is engaged to a woman called Svetlana and is paranoid about the size of his backside, the latter concern captured in the percussion-heavy cinematic ballad Big Ass, Cold Heart. Shane cannot quite get over Ilya’s addiction to playing post-coital Candy Crush Saga on his phone. Events come to an emotional climax at Shane’s luxurious lakeside cottage to the accompaniment of a country-infused tune, I Can Host.
Director Alan Kliffer delivers plenty of belly laughs, though you may want to rewatch the TV series and get up to speed on current Gen Z preoccupations if you want to catch some of the in-jokes. Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody is enjoyable pantomime froth that, like the books and TV it parodies, treats queer romance as a headline event. What’s not to like about that? As Susan helpfully sums it up, “whether oral or anal, it’ll make your hair curl”.
Runs until 1 November 2026
