The Times - Positive with
Let?s reassure those who recall the film of Priscilla, or helped to make it the cult it remains, that the stage version has everything, maybe more than everything, they could reasonably expect.
There?s the bus of the title, wheels turning, steel body swivelling, innards a weird mix of rainbow chairs and model flamingos.
There?s Jason Donovan as one of the three drag queens this lumbering contraption carries from Sydney to places where none have fluttered stoles or flaunted sequins before.
There?s energy, fun, tunefulness and, above all, the most outrageous swirl of costumes that I, who have seen La Cage aux Folles and even boggled at Ian McKellen?s Widow Twankey, have yet encountered.
Only one thing is missing, and that?s the desert of the title.
This is inevitable, given that the Palace stage is the size of a sandpit, but still a pity. The vast stony, scrubby vistas we saw in the film weren?t just decorative. The idea was to suggest that here was a pristine wilderness inhabited, if at all, by strange and exotic creatures.
In the Aussie Outback Donovan?s Tick, Oliver Thornton?s Felicia and Tony Sheldon?s Bernadette seem out of place, but are actually as much part of nature as the wildlife lurking and scurrying beside the road.
The film?s final moment, when all three stand above a huge canyon looking like dragonflies or gorgeous lizards, is quite a loss.
The story is pretty wishful. The reason Tick wants to perform in Alice Springs is to see the ex-wife and (especially) the small son whose existence there he?s hidden from his fellow gays, and, this being a feel-good show, his welcome isn?t exactly unenthusiastic.
Again, Sheldon?s transsexual Bernadette looks likely to end up up with the genial garage mechanic he met when the bus broke down, especially since the bloke has a mad wife who runs away.
But there?s unsentimental compensation in the picture the authors, Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott, draw of the drear communities the queens pass through.
A slob called Sharon, whose breasts are indistinguishable from her mammoth tum, tries to run them out of town.
Their bus gets plastered with obscenities.
Thornton?s Felicia, a bitchy maverick with a silly-ass titter, flirts with a macho Oz and needs rescuing from a beating. Homophobia is all around, but so is good humour and colour.
It?s those I?ll remember. The lead performances are fine.
If Sheldon hasn?t the sense of long-endured pain that Terence Stamp brought to Bernadette in the film, he?s still a humane, touching presence.
And at least when he?s in his paternal mode, Donovan also brings a little gravity and texture to a potentially bland character.
There are wisecracks galore (?we?ll be nothing but skin and silicone?, moans Tick after that desert breakdown) and songs you?ll recognise, starting with Downtown, ending in Always on My Mind.
And the queens? clothes come with every variety of feather, plant, stripe and lurid square, even a frock made of sandals.
Anenomes sprout from wigs like congealed sponges and, as if that weren?t enough, the chorus appears dressed as everything from angels to silvery spooks, in one case weirdly pushing a giant stiletto-heeled shoe.
The desert may not be visible ? but somehow it flowers
Namo i love u but we get it already....you don't like Madonna
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