Head Over Heels – Hudson Theatre, New York

Peppermint in Head Over Heels at the Hudson Theatre, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

Head Over Heels continues at the Hudson Theatre, New York.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

A lot of theatrical smarts are on view in Head Over Heels, but this new jukebox Broadway musical also has a tendency to wallow in some low-grade smirking, even as it offers a celebration of love in general, both hetero and homo.

The show highlights the music of the Go-Go’s, the five-female band that found its place in rock history during the 1980s as dispensers of new wave music. The bouncy tunes are shovelled – sometimes comfortably, sometimes not – into a script based on, of all things, the 16th century pastoral romance The Arcadia by Philip Sidney.

Jeff Whitty, of Avenue Q fame, conceived Head Over Heels and wrote the original book. It was then further adapted by James Magruder, who several years back transformed the 18th century Pierre de Marivaux commedia dell’arte piece Le Triomphe de l’Amourinto the well-respected Broadway musical The Triumph of Love.

We could be in pretty rarified waters, with dialogue written in unrhymed verse that goes like: “By thy silence thou wouldst have/Me ask if thou art angry.” Still, the style stays in the service of a script that several years ago might have been called campy and even more years ago might have been labeled risqué.

The story takes us back to the long-ago land of Sidney’s title, where the citizens have lived happily for years, because as they tell us in the opening number, ‘We Got the Beat’. However, it isn’t long before the fairly smug and self-satisfied king Basilius (Jeremy Kushnier) receives a warning from an oracle – what else? – that the country is in peril: it will lose its beat, and he will be replaced.

So, he packs up his family and sets off on a journey to ward off whatever disaster may be heading their way. His co-travellers include his long-time queen Gynecia (Rachel York); his older daughter Pamela (Bonnie Milligan), a celebrated beauty who has been rejecting suitors for years; the younger daughter, the sweet and petite Philoclea (Alexandra Socha); Dametas (Tom Alan Robbins), the king’s trusted servant; and Mopsa (Taylor Iman Jones), who is Dametas’ daughter and handmaid to Pamela.

Along the way, Pamela realises why none of the suitors clicked with her: she’s really attracted to Mopsa, who has reciprocal feelings.

There’s also a lot of sexual byplay around the shepherd Musidorus (Andrew Durand), who’s in love with Philoclea and has followed along disguised as an Amazon. It’s all peppered with rather overdone gags about lesbianism, genitalia and the like.

The beauty of Pamela is also gagged up, because she’s played by the amply-figured Milligan. Making her Broadway debut, however, she takes the guffaws in her stride and proves to be a talented musical performer, holding at least her own with all of her colleagues on stage, several of whom have pockets-full of Broadway credits.

The camp quotient of the show derives in large part from the oracle, played with snarky zest by the performer identified solely as Peppermint. As her programme bio tells us, Peppermint – like Milligan – is also making her Broadway debut but “as the first transgender woman to create a principal role”. At the performance attended, she was obviously an audience favourite, with her various appearances and saucy laugh-lines met with whoops and hollers. The oracle’s self-description as ‘a non-binary plural” also gets a burst of audience appreciation, acknowledging the show’s atmosphere of inclusion for all gender variations, as ragged as it is.

The staging by Michael Mayer, whose credits include the revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch as well as such notable offerings as the original Spring Awakening and American Idiot, keeps the action moving in blithe fashion, except for a tendency to linger a bit too long on the salacious bits. The energy, though, is pretty much ramped up in Spencer Liff’s infectious choreography, which every now and then takes on a balletic spin alongside the preponderance of angular gesture and gyration.

Also on the plus side are the orchestrations and arrangements by musical supervisor Tom Kitt, an award-winning composer whose resumé is topped by Next to Normal. He imbues the pop music of the Go-Go’s – such songs as ‘Mad About You’ and ‘Good Girl’ – with varied syncopations and occasional harmonic richness, along with helpings of humour.

The humour is also evident in the sort-of-Elizabethan costumes by Arianne Phillips, goosed up with glittery Las Vegas touches.

Perhaps the most endearing elements of the show are the lovingly old-fashioned sets by Julian Crouch, painted flats and set pieces of pretty forests and skies filled with puffy clouds, gorgeously lit in baths of colour by Kevin Adams. Enclosed in a plushy fake proscenium, they emit a gently embracing storybook welcome. It’s a quality that this sometimes off-putting, determinedly raucous offering could use a bit more of.

Ron Cohen