The View UpStairs ☆☆☆
Soho Theatre, London
The real life event forming the basis and inspiration for this musical is the arson attack in 1973 on a queer bar in New Orleans, killing 32 people (mostly gay men); woefully underreported at the time due to strong levels of societal homophobia.
In 1973, 7 out of 10 Americans thought homosexuality was “always wrong” and only that year had the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove it from their list of mental illnesses (the remove vote won). We tell ourselves that things have got better, but this week Poland’s government started to declare certain regions “LGBT-free Zones” and 2016 saw a mass shooting of 49 people in a gay club in Orlando.
The View UpStairs strives to celebrate the lives of some of the regulars at the UpStairs drinking den and remember a lost queer history. It’s an important and admirable intention. The convoluted and heavy-handed way in which it tries to frame the story within a 2019 narrative involving an Instagay millennial who’s recently purchased the venue didn’t really work for me and seemed to serve no purpose other than provide cheap gags about millennials.
As an ensemble piece, most if not all of the characters onstage get a crack at a solo number and there is some soul-stirring singing going on, but there’s no room left for anything as subtle as character-development or insight.
I’d have liked to hear more from the bar owner, proud and loud butch dyke Henri (played wonderfully by Carly Mercedes Dyer). Tyrone Huntley as the time-traveling millennial, Wes, was never less than engaging, but the weak songwriting really lets the whole thing down and I came away without retaining a single melody.
I still can’t believe they used the line “life is a roller coaster” at some point. And what should have been a total showstopper – the Latino drag queen who’s just been roughed up by cops giving it her all in a makeshift frock – was let down by a lack of a tune (though Garry Lee’s performance was spectacular, nonetheless). And call me old-fashioned but surely tunes – breathtaking, unforgettable tunes you find yourself singing on the way home – are what musicals are about.
Written by Max Vernon
Directed by Jonathan O’Boyle
https://sohotheatre.com/shows/
Thu 18 Jul – Sat 24 Aug
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).
Labels: 2019, Jonathan Kemp, London Theatre, review
