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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
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I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
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Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Dominic Cooke.
Cast: Kate Gillespie, Kevin Harvey, Alex Lanipekun, Leon Lopez, Holly Quin-Ankrah, Danny Sapani, Craig Stein, Jessika Williams
Description: Dominic Cooke directs Tarell Alvin McCraney's comic tale about life in a competitive drag queen refuge. Starring Kevin Harvey and Kate Gillespie.
Trains: Tube: Sloane Square 
Phone: 0207565 5000
Website: www.royalcourttheatre.com
Welcome to the house of fun: glittering costumes and spectacular lip-synching in cabaret style in Standard award winner Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s exploration of the New York cross-dressing scene at the Royal Court
Here it is – a ticket of admission to a gender-blurring world of which few will have personal, adult experience — except perhaps in their wildest dreams.
Wig Out! by Tarrell Alvin McCraney, winner of this year’s Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright award, throws much glitter but little piercing light upon the complexities of erotic life for cross-dressing, gay, black men and their lovers.
It steps into the drag house and drag ball communities of New York African-Americans and Latins, where sexual rivalry flourishes and hierarchies keep changing. McCraney’s characters soliloquise, in the play’s mock-Shakespearean verse, upon a grandmother’s wig that first prompted them to face their difficult destinies and slip into dresses. The interesting idea is to show how these drag-houses, self-created refuges for young men into drag and out of kilter with straight society, offer escape from families for whom a gay cross-dresser is many high-heeled steps worse than a simple queer...
A hit in New York and now exuberantly directed by Dominic Cooke, Wig Out! concentrates attention upon the House of Light, which enters a Cinderella drag ball contest after a challenge from the House of Diabolique. The sounds of bitchery and comic back-biting, or front-biting even, become refrains, voiced in a lingo sometimes hard to hear and when heard, difficult to decipher.
The best aspect of the show is its novelty value. It absorbs and displays a range of youthful influences. A mock –classical, genuine all-girl Chorus, The Fates, speak scene directions, talk cool and sing in Supremes style, presiding over the action, in which lip-synched songs, voguing, hip-hop and the climactic catwalk fashion competition loom bright not to say dazzling.
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s lipsticked, late-teens Nina, puts on a superbly disconcerting performance in a short, white dress and long wig, looking every inch — aside from her male breasts and muscled biceps — an imperfect lady. As we are shown, in an ironical insight into this Genetesque world, where little is quite what it seems, Nina appears in more ways than one, a top girl.
McCraney interweaves thin, plot lines, centred upon this House of Light, where hierarchies are challenged and simmering sexual tensions increased. Lucian, Danny Sapani’s butch, trouser-wearing, house father with a very roving eye, sees an opportunity to dispense with Kevin Harvey’s mother figure Rey-Rey and replace her with a younger model. In the second act we are given a startling insight into trans-gendered seduction when Alex Lanipekun’s fine, bemused, straight-appearing Eric is seduced by a truculent Nina on the subway and brought to the house, which ultimately looks as if it may become his refuge from the world too.
Ultz’s set, dominated by a long, elevated cat walk, protrudes like a big tongue into the auditorium. Beglamoured drag ball competitors strut their stuff with spectacular, lip-syncing verve in cabaret club style and Cooke’s swinging production.
Wig Out!, however, in the last resort, makes too light and little of how a black New Yorker survives when he wants to be more than a bit of a lady.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
