Once concealing himself behind net curtains in the Kent district of Medway, Jonny Woo’s journey from shy 16-year-old discovering his sexuality to ending his one-man show at the Soho Theatre with a firework exploding from his naked bottom is quite the story, not to mention a risk assessment nightmare for the venue’s small upstairs space, where said firework protrudes fairly close to the front row. Jonny Woo: Suburbia Re-loaded expands his 2025 performance with new material and choreography; it certainly has a bold finale, yet some elements feel over-performed while the overall effect is scattered.
Woo takes the audience through a series of set-pieces in a 70-minute show that uses lots of audio newsclips, excerpts from television shows like Eurovision and music to mark decisive turning points in the performer’s life. Opening in 1988, Woo creates an evocative sense of hazy glamour thudding against ordinary working-class life as he discovers what is hidden behind the sheer net curtains that frame the show and the star’s life story. In what becomes a series of often lyrically sketched memories, there’s no interest in delving into the implications of this contained living where self is something that must be concealed from others, but given the search for self-expression which follows, it seems a shame not to engage with this formative experience more deeply.
In the following two decades that Suburbia Re-loaded is concerned with, Woo moves to London in the 1990s, replacing the lyrics of Blur’s Parklife with an ode to Shoreditch as numerous club nights, pub visits and drugged-fuelled good times are recreated, echoed by an audience of friends and contemporaries who recognise most of the venues and substances consumed. Just as suddenly, it’s off to New York for Woo’s first drag performance, a surreal segment taking place during his set and later in a yellow cab, but it’s hard to make out the purpose of this element as Woo segues back to life in Medway and to who he has become.
There are through-lines here, a chance to reflect with pathos on some of the things that have shaped his life, a theme clarified in the final monologue as Woo thinks back to his first sexual encounter as a 16-year-old at the height of the AIDS pandemic with a much older man who didn’t use a condom, and the fear he carried as a result. These are the moments when the show strikes at something deeper, a hurt beneath the surface, a sense of exploitation that lingers almost 40 years on, but all too quickly, Woo draws the net curtain back into place, and the emotion is concealed.
It is a vibrant show, bursting with lots of ideas and visual tricks, including regular costume changes, lip sync segments, dance pieces and engagement with the audience, although the muffled microphones during some of the music sections make the dialogue hard to make out. At the start, there is a feeling that Woo has told these stories many times before in this show, and while evocative of the people he met along the way, particularly as a schoolboy, they are dashed off too quickly. But by the time Woo is naked with a guitar and firework exploding from a bottom he has also just flashed the audience, we certainly know him far more intimately than we might have expected.
Runs until 25 July 2026
