Any cabaret based around musical theatre standards needs a strong editorial through-line in order to stand out. Maybe it’s revelling in the lyrical complexity and musical dexterity of some of Sondheim’s best work, or celebrating some other composer’s oeuvre with reverence and celebration.
Other shows revel in the feel-good familiarity of current (or recent) West End hits, either taking all of them deadly seriously or at least acknowledging the smiles that get raised when familiar standards play to eager audiences.
Or just maybe, like this quasi-anarchic showing from drag acts Le Gateau Chocolat and Jonny Woo, we can acknowledge that beyond the cheese lies a louche, over-the-top craziness. Musical theatre can be silly, ridiculous, occasionally pompous, but it’s broad enough and robust enough to survive affectionate ribbing from two lovers of the medium.
The combination of adoration and silliness gets underway from the off, as Le Gateau exercises his astonishing baritone voice as Christine in the title song from Phantom of the Opera, before Woo enters as the Phantom wearing not the white face covering from the West End production, but a Darth Vader mask instead.
And so begins a journey through some of the most well-known musical theatre numbers in history. Like most people, Woo does not possess a voice even approaching Le Gateau’s calibre, preferring instead to lip-sync to several week known numbers. Performing as every single member of the Les Misérables company to a cast recording of At the End of the Day certainly raises a smile. Later, his performance of Mein Herr from Cabaret to Liza Minnelli’s vocals is enhanced, if you can call it that, by starting off wearing oversized Mickey Mouse gloves and incorporating a burlesque striptease that sees his costume reduce to a pair of very skimpy briefs.
Beyond the singing and lip-syncing, what does dominate is the sense of the duo’s work as a double act. The two performers have very different energy levels but, over the course of touring this show (itself a follow-up to a 2018 production on similar themes) Woo and Le Gateau have clearly developed a sense of cohesive chaos in which they work incredibly well together.
So well, in fact, that at times it does actually get in the way of the musical performances. The first act comes and goes at just over half an hour with just six performed songs, and although nobody takes Le Gateau’s initial promise to cover “every single musical ever” seriously, getting through so few initially feels like those coming for an evening full of show tunes might be disappointed.
The pace picks up substantially in the second half, especially once Le Gateau dons a tinsel-covered dress to perform Let it Go from Frozen while Woo performs lo-fi special effects with spray-can snow and a wind machine.
And it is this point at which the disparate elements of the whole show – adoration of the musical theatre songbook, beautifully sung by Le Gateau Chocolat but with a delightfully aware eye on the inherent silliness – all cohere at last. A rendition of Beauty and the Beast, with the stage lights taken down and lit only by audience torchlight, continues in the same vein.
And then, we are told all too soon, we come to the end. A singalong segment touches on a couple of Moulin Rouge! numbers, before climaxing with a tribute to Olivia Newton-John with two of her best numbers from Grease: Hopefully Devoted to You and, in a raucous, crowd-pleasing finale, Summer Nights.
And then the evening is over. Now That’s What We call Musicals could be tighter, and could certainly include a wider variety of musical theatre numbers. But for all its haphazard qualities, and almost certainly because of them, it is a tremendous heap of fun.
Reviewed on 3 September 2022
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