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Le Gateau Chocolat & Jonny Woo
A Night At the Musicals ☆☆☆☆☆
Soho Theatre, London
From the moment you walk into the upstairs theatre, to the strains of Liza Minnelli, to the moment you exit, accompanied by Barbra Streisand singing ‘People’, you’re immersed in the magical, flamboyant world of the musical, that art form so beloved of the gays.
Fresh from a successful run down under at the Adelaide Festival, Jonny Woo & Le Gateau Chocolat are hot to trot their way through a whistle-stop tour of the history of the musical. They don’t quite keep their promise to sing something from every single musical ever written but they come pretty close in the 75 minutes they are onstage singing and dancing their big gay hearts out.
Woo’s flawless lip synching is a joy to behold, and his lapdance to Cabaret’s “Mein Herr” with a man plucked from the audience is one of the show’s highlights; as is Chocolat’s fabulous rendition of Frozen’s ‘Let It Go’, complete with light-up costume and wind machine.
The banter between the two is perfectly caustic and while there’s drag-a-plenty the show is never a drag, culminating in an audience sing-a-long to Grease’s ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’. I’m hopelessly devoted to these two musical divas, that’s for sure.
LE GATEAU CHOCOLAT & JONNY WOO: A NIGHT AT THE MUSICALS Mon 11 – Sat 30 Mar 2019 8.45pm
https://sohotheatre.com/shows/le-gateau-chocolat-jonny-woo-a-night-at-the-musicals-2/
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of DESIRE (2015, both Punctum Books).
P.S. You may also like to check out this interview Queerguru filmed with Le Gateau Chocolat last year https:// queerguru.com/2018/05/le-gateau-chocolat-a-queer-renaissance-man
