Tag Archives: Joni Ayton-Kent

PRISCILLA THE PARTY!

★★★★★

HERE at Outernet

PRISCILLA THE PARTY! at HERE at Outernet

★★★★★

“An incredible night out.”

“Priscilla The Party” is joyous, tremendous musical fun. Based on the 1994 Academy Award winner “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, “Priscilla the Party” hails from Australia in 2006. It is a rip-roaring celebration of drag, queerness and camp musical theatre. Each scene is calibrated towards entertainment and intrigue from the start. The story follows ‘Tick’ (Owain Williams) as he travels across Australia to reach his wife (Kimberly Blake) and his child (a stooge) as part of a fabulous trio of drag queens travelling in a bus they christen “Priscilla”. Adam (Reece Kerridge) and Bernadette (Dakota Starr) accompany Tick as he travels throughout Australia battling homophobia, transphobia, making allies, and delivering hit after hit. The show is an immersive experience (developed and directed by Simon Phillips), with staging and actors moving throughout the crowd on the dancefloor. The set (Brian Thomson and Justin Nardella) and direction make great use of the atmosphere of a club with an impressive line up of dance hits from “Say a Little Prayer” to “Born This Way”. A tale of love, adversity and Aussie humour shines with amazing theatrical gravitas throughout.

Every cast member performs with outstanding energy, delivering a varied set of pop/dance songs in a jukebox musical for the ages. The quality of musical performance is high with remarkable talent on display throughout as Queens deliver ballads and romps with equal intensity and stage presence. Beautiful vocals draw us into the story and relay the emotions of the characters. The band are brilliant and you can tell they know they have the best gig in town (Musical Arrangements and Orchestration Stephen ‘Spud’ Murphy). The stage management team work tirelessly to coordinate movement of stages as they weave throughout the crowd. The sound design (Ben Harrison) includes familiar hits, punctuated by topical music in the breaks that ensure a continuation of the party. The multi-media venue makes use of video backgrounds (also Thompson and Nardella) and vibrant club lighting (Per Hörding). The show includes all the best parts of a drag show with all the precision and thought of a well-crafted musical (Musical arrangements and direction Steve Geere). A highlight are the fantastic costumes (Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner) and wigs, delivering camp, classic and heightened drag in the best possible way.

Seated dining experiences are available, though dance floor tickets make up the bulk of audience members who get to join in the concert-like drag-show-esque party atmosphere. “Priscilla the Party” is stunningly unique and totally immersive, taking the audience on a hugely enjoyable road trip through Australia whilst delivering one spectacular party en route. The close to three hours playing time flies by as the colourful scenes progress in and around the gloriously camp ‘Cockatoo Club’. Arrive early to enjoy the full experience, as there are superb opening acts to enjoy. With drag queens and musical actors combining their strengths, “Priscilla The Party” makes for an incredible night out.


PRISCILLA THE PARTY! at HERE at Outernet

Reviewed on 24th March 2024

by Jessica Potts

Photography by Marc Brenner

 

 

 

 

Recently reviewed by Jessica:

HOSTAGE | ★★★★ | Etcetera Theatre | March 2024
APRICOT | ★★★★ | Theatre503 | March 2024
SARAH QUAND MÊME | | Drayton Arms | February 2024
AMUSEMENTS | ★★★★ | Soho Theatre | February 2024
WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE | ★★★ | Soho Theatre | February 2024
TWO ROUNDS | ★★★ | Jermyn Street Theatre | February 2024

PRISCILLA THE PARTY!

PRISCILLA THE PARTY!

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The Prince

The Prince

★★★

Southwark Playhouse

THE PRINCE at the Southwark Playhouse

★★★

 

The Prince

“Over the course of the play, no antagonist is revealed, and little conflict truly arises, resulting in a flat conclusion”

 

Performance itself lies at the heart of The Prince, Abigail Thorn’s playwriting debut at Southwark Playhouse’s Large Theatre. Characters find themselves stuck inside a multiverse of Shakespearean dramas (Though the action is mostly confined to Henry IV Part I) and at odds with the rigidity of their roles. Sam, played by Joni Ayton-Kent, who is cast as a number of nameless bit characters, is desperately searching for a way out. Mary Malone plays Jen, who finds herself in a similar situation and decides to tag along with Sam. Jen, however, finds tensions within the ways in which the primary characters perform their gender, and begins to poke holes in their constructed identities. In particular, Jen reads Thorn’s Hotspur as a trans woman and Corey Montague Sholay’s Prince Hal as a gay man. Over the course of the play, both characters waffle between conformity to their roles and self-actualization, a broader metaphor for the struggles endured and decisions faced when butting up against a rigid gender binary, especially the construct of masculinity. Though The Prince suffers from a lack of narrative coherence, the metaphor is powerful and at times quite personally affecting.

Thorn and Malone, both in principal roles, turn in strong performances. Malone plays Jen’s fish-out-of-water bewilderment with earnest charm and comedic timing. The funniest moments of the play come from the ways in which other characters play off of hers. Thorn, as Hotspur, carries the show. She peels back her character’s internal tension in careful layers and remains nimble and forceful in her handling of both her own verse and Shakespeare’s. The scenes in which she actively decides to continue in the role of the masculine hero at the expense of her own identity carry tremendous weight. It is unfortunate then, that the structural foundation of the play is unable to support these performances.

The Prince seems to eschew both coherent world-building and narrative signposting, both of which are essential when leading an audience through a multiverse. The moments when Jen is able to break the Shakespearean characters out of their performances are nearly indistinguishable for the moments when they remain stuck. In essence, these breaks happen at random, giving Jen little to learn about the mechanics of the world into which she has been dropped. Sam’s desire to escape should be easily aided by a magical map of sorts, represented by a somewhat unconvincing plastic tetrahedron, but the object only appears all-powerful in Jen’s hands, though no context is given to allow the audience to understand this discrepancy. These two characters are also denied specific or rich inner lives, even an inkling of who they might be outside of their current situation. The multiverse device primarily exists in absentia, as most of Sam and Jen’s haphazard narrative hopping occurs within Henry IV Part I. The play’s only detour into Hamlet arrives without much context and serves only as justification to shoehorn in the “To be, or not to be?” soliloquy, though Thorn delivers it well. Over the course of the play, no antagonist is revealed, and little conflict truly arises, resulting in a flat conclusion.

Martha Godfrey’s lighting design feels similarly uneven. The tubes of LED light that hang at odd angles above the playing space are visually compelling and seem to indicate different corners of the Shakespearean multiverse. But their function remains out of sync with the play throughout, illuminating, changing colours, falling and rising without impetus or textual justification. Rebecca Cartwright’s historical costumes, on the other hand, are a strong point of the play’s design—the ways in which they mutate alongside Jen’s poking and prodding is masterful.

Though it contains joyous and raucous moments, as well as symbolic significance, Thorn’s debut remains unnecessarily messy throughout, wanting for narrative drive and formal consistency.

 

Reviewed on 19th September 2022

by JC Kerr

Photography by Mark Senior

 

 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

The Woods | ★★★ | March 2022
Anyone Can Whistle | ★★★★ | April 2022
I Know I Know I Know | ★★★★ | April 2022
The Lion | ★★★ | May 2022
Evelyn | ★★★ | June 2022
Tasting Notes | ★★ | July 2022
Doctor Faustus | ★★★★★ | September 2022

 

 

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