Luke Bayer in Diva! Live from Hell at the Turbine Theatre, London. Picture: Harry Elletson
Diva: Live from Hell! continues at the Turbine Theatre, London until 10 September 2022.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Battersea’s Turbine Theatre is about to see its first West End transfer when Rob Madge’s solo autobiographical show My Son’s A Queer (But What Can You Do?) which was developed there in 2021 opens at the Garrick Theatre in October. The theatrical obsessive that is Madge would surely recognise themselves in Desmond Channing, the drama society president of a High School in Florida, in Diva: Live from Hell!, though I sincerely hope that Madge isn’t as frighteningly ambitious and ruthless as Channing is.
Modelled on Margo Channing from All About Eve, this Channing meets his Eve Harrington in Evan Harris, a new arrival at the High School, who is quickly cast as romantic lead Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance (in which Channing will be playing the Pirate King). Things soon turn dark, though, as Evan usurps Desmond in his romantic aspirations and eventually even the drama society hierarchy, with deadly consequences.
The show, with book and characters by Nora Brigid Monahan and songs by Alexander Sage Oyen, is a macabre high school musical about revenge that’s like Glee-meets-Carrie. Originally premiered at Off-Broadway’s Theater for the New City in 2017, its originally planned London premiere in March 2020 was derailed by the pandemic, but it has been worth the wait.
It has a wittily knowing script that references everything from Bob Fosse’s scrotum sweat (yes, really) to Howard Sherman (yes, really, REALLY – formerly executive director of the American Theatre Wing but now a New York arts journalist and campaigner) and New York actor Jackie Hoffman. Not everyone is going to appreciate all of this, though Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, Angela Lansbury and La Chanze are also variously namechecked. Broadway aficionados will be in their element. There’s even a snatch of Kevin Kline in On the Twentieth Century on the soundtrack. (No wonder I loved it!)
But you don’t have to be in-the-know to appreciate this slice of decadent musical theatre heaven… or rather hell, which is where it is set. Director Joe McNeice, who has also designed it, creates an immersive nightclub set, with cabaret tables at the front, as Luke Bayer’s Desmond relives the story on a loop that has brought him to the ‘Seventh Circle’ club in hell for eternity.
Bayer effortlessly switches from Desmond to all the other characters as well, in a solo tour-de-force set of performances. This is as demanding, commanding and ferocious a performance as the one required in that other solo Broadway show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has long gained cult status. This show could achieve a similar success.
Mark Shenton
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