MUSIK
Wilton’s Music Hall
★★★★
“Barber gives the character everything she has”
Jonathan Harvey and the Pet Shop Boys’ salacious, scandalous and searingly funny “Musik” is only an hour long, but it will take stage management twice as long each night to clear up all the celebrity names dropped. It’s a good thing, too, that we’re fully aware that this is a work of complete fiction (although we would love it to be all true) otherwise the libel lawyers would outnumber the paying audience. Mind you, my guess is that they’d be won over pretty rapidly by Frances Barber’s brilliant and hilarious delivery of Harvey’s script, that charts the outrageous life of a certain Billie Trix.
So, who is this Billie Trix? She was first introduced to the world in the 2001 musical, ‘Closer to Heaven’ as a retired rock icon and actress. Although the narrator, she had a relatively small part of the story. In 2019, Harvey and the Pet Shop Boys created “Musik”, the spin-off cabaret show that propelled Trix to centre stage, exploring her back story from her ignominious birth in war-torn Berlin to the present day. Not quite a ‘cradle-to-grave’ story, as she still manages to keep the latter at bay, against all the odds. Six songs pepper the narrative, opening with ‘Mongrel’. “Times were tough, but I was tougher…” she croons in her ravaged voice, “times were rough, but I was rougher”. Yet by the final song she is undeniably celebratory, belting out the fact that you’ve got to live your life for every moment (she certainly has). “We never know what’s round the corner” she says by way of introduction, “and that’s what gives me hope”.
And what corners she has turned, managing to find herself at the forefront of each revolution in pop culture; giving birth to the American folk revival, inventing ‘Disco’, inspiring Andy Warhol’s pop art culture, creating Madonna’s image and – in an update since its 2019 premier – unwittingly causing the global pandemic. She witnessed Vietnam, rejected the hand of a young Trump (good move), and got up to all graphically described shenanigans with the likes of Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Mick (and Bianca) Jagger, Frank Zappa, Shania Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, even the Dalai Lama… I could go on. Trix is clearly delusional, and her memoir is fantastical. She is larger than life, arrogant, self-assured and psychotically callous and indifferent to opinion. But she is adorable, charismatic, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Barber gives the character everything she has, bringing her to life and making her preposterous anecdotes totally believable… almost. With expert comic timing, Barber mixes over-the-top self-aggrandisement with dead-pan self-deprecation, conquering the stage and the audience with a performance Billie Trix could only dream of.
Terry Johnson directs the show with the pulsating pace of a Pet Shop Boys dance anthem. Barber talks and moves at 120bpm, seamlessly segueing into the musical numbers. The unmistakable Tennant and Lowe synth-pop backing does give a vague karaoke feel to the songs, but Barber’s crackling vocals adds the required depth, aided by Harvey’s and the duo’s scathingly clever lyrics. The songs are not necessarily what we’ll be taking home with us – it is Harvey’s razor-sharp writing, coupled with Barber’s fiercely formidable performance that will be truly remembered. Billie Trix insists that she is a ‘gift to the world’. A dubious claim. But there’s no doubting that Frances Barber is a gift to the theatre world. Her character is indomitable, her show unmissable.
MUSIK
Wilton’s Music Hall
Reviewed on 17th October 2025
by Jonathan Evans
Photography by Charlie Flint
Previously reviewed at this venue:
THE REMARKABLE BEN HART | ★★★★★ | September 2025
MACBETH | ★★★★ | July 2025
ROMEO AND JULIET | ★★★ | June 2025
MARY AND THE HYENAS | ★★★ | March 2025
THE MAGIC FLUTE | ★★★★ | February 2025
POTTED PANTO | ★★★★★ | December 2024
