Manchester’s mini yet mighty Hope Mill has secured another coup for Christmas. After last year’s European premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella comes the world premiere of this musical based on the cult 1995 road movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. It’s a fairytale too, of sorts, with script and direction by Douglas Carter Beane, who also wrote the film’s screenplay (and provided the book for Cinderella). There is even a triumvirate of fairy godmothers in the form of New York drag queens Vida, Noxeema and Chi Chi, whose Cadillac trip to Hollywood stalls in one-horse-town Snydersville, where these fabulous fish out of water upend the locals’ lives.
The film owed much to its against-type casting, with Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo all frocked up. Tonight, it’s a credit to the warm, nuanced performances of Peter Caulfield (statuesque Vida), Gregory Haney (shade-slinging Noxeema) and new graduate Pablo Gómez Jones (not-quite-ingenue Chi Chi) that those superstars are swiftly forgotten. There is a high-energy, empowering pop opener, Feel the Light, with the brilliant Theo Maddix presiding over a drag contest.
That song shares some of the swagger of Salt-N-Pepa’s I Am the Body Beautiful from the film’s soundtrack, whose attitude and range is sadly not matched by lyricist Lewis Flinn’s score, played by a band of three, which often keeps this journey in the middle of the road. But the story fits the musical form like Vida’s long gloves, even if Jane McMurtrie’s frothy choreography has surprisingly little voguing. Guided not by maps but by their hearts – and a cryptic portrait of Julie Newmar – they steer a Caddy designed by Katie Lias complete with all-singing (human) tyres.
The adaptation excises much of the torment faced by the queens, whether in their home lives (notably Vida’s estranged family) or their new surroundings. The joke in the film is that most of Snydersville don’t realise the newcomers are not women but men in drag. What abuse they receive (and sometimes dish out) is predominantly racist and sexist. Those slurs are softened in the musical. A subplot about the domestic abuse experienced by Carol Ann (Carolyn Maitland) remains but the film’s toxic sheriff is here more of a dolt, played by Duncan Burt. Even the love rivalry between Chi Chi and Bobby Lee (Emily Ooi) is muted.
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) means you’ll need sunglasses in the front row.
At Hope Mill theatre, Manchester, until 17 December
