Manchester UK may seem an unlikely place for the World Premiere of a new musical based on a hit Hollywood movie, but that’s exactly what has just happened at the city’s Hope Mill Theatre. Run by married couple Joseph Houston and William Whelton, this independent theatre has been making waves with its innovative program since it opened in 2015. In fact, in 2018 it won the prestigious Fringe Venue of The Year at The Stage awards.
To Wong Foo, The Musical is an uplifting story about drag queens that we need right now with this present political climate. In fact, back in the early 1990s the writer Douglas Carter Beane was inspired by an anti-gay propaganda film called The Gay Agenda. Of that film, Beane said, “There’s a scene where they show drag queens going through a town, and the narrator is warning the viewers that these people will take over your town, and I thought, Well, that would be fun.”
Beane is now also the director of this story about three New York drag queens Vida (Peter Caulfield) Noxeema (Gregory Haney) and Chi Chi (Pablo Gómez Jones) whose Cadillac trip to Hollywood stalls in one-horse-town Snydersville, where these fabulous fish out of water upend the locals’ lives. The joke is that most of Snydersville doesn’t realize the newcomers are not women but men in drag. What abuse they receive (and sometimes dish out) is predominantly racist and sexist.
In their review, The Guardian wrote “The result is a rose-tinted fantasia that, if almost devoid of tension, offers an antidote to America’s modern drag bans and wittily dissolves the division between “people like you” and “people like us”. The central trio are superb singers (especially Caulfield’s upper range) and the combined pizzazz of, among others, Gregory Gale (costumes), Bobbie Zlotnik (wigs) and Jack Weir (lighting) mean you’ll need sunglasses in the front row.”
It means that is so well worth jumping on a plane or train to Manchester which after all was the setting for the original cult TV series Queer As Folk
To Wong Foo The Musical runs through to 17 December.Labels: 2023, Douglas Carter Beane, Hope Mill Theatre, Manc=chester, To Wong Foo The Musical, World Premiee
