Hot Stuff dazzles, sizzles and giggles

Ceri Dupree in Hot Stuff at the Curve, Leicester. Picture: Pamela Raith Photography

Playing at the Curve, Leicester until May 26.

There is an insatiable appetite in Leicester for the rock musical Hot Stuff, an audacious, impudent, high-energy re-working of the Faust legend in which Joe Soap abandons his sweetheart, Julie, on the dance floor and sells his soul to Lucy Fur for fame and fortune as a rock singer.

The headlong plunge through his incarnations as the glam rocker Lenny Lurex, and the punk rocker Jimmy Filth, is a vehicle for all the best-known hits of the 1970s and 1980s, from Suzi Quatro to Gloria Gaynor, Abba to the Sex Pistols. The loudest roars of approval come for Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ and Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’. And nothing stills the audience or touches them more than John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, sung with such clarity and integrity by Stephen Webb.

The show has been revived every two or three years since its first performance in 1992 and never fails to fill the house. In comparison with its earlier incarnations, it is now incredibly sophisticated, exploiting to the full Curve’s high-tech space and state-of-the-art lighting and projections. There’s even a misty, ethereal flying sequence to accompany ‘Space Oddity’. It rocks, it dazzles, it sizzles, and above all, it makes you laugh.

Much of that of course is down to Ceri Dupree as Lucy Fur. He is a drag artist and pantomime dame rolled into one, with consummate timing and a impudent rapport with an audience that begs to be insulted. He is a gleeful, wicked impersonator of everyone from an impassive checkout girl in outsize PVC platforms, to Dolly Parton, Mrs Thatcher and a garrulous Irish nun. He is simply outrageous. There’s a joke about an Iceberg lettuce that you just  couldn’t repeat.

The principals have all been here before – Jason Denton and Ngo Ngofa both brilliantly reprising their roles as Joe and Julie, along with Webb as The Boss and Yildiz Hussein as Miss Hot Stuff. Denton is ugliness incarnate as Jimmy Filth one moment, but can then move us almost to tears with ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’. Ngofa brings enormous power, passion and authenticity to numbers like Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’.  

Twenty-one years later and with three national tours behind it, the musical no longer dwells on the tragedy of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll era, which was the untimely and often violent deaths of many of the stars. In early incarnations of the show, the stark display of newspaper headlines sobered the audience with the pity of it all. That’s gone now, and the images of Freddy Mercury and the rest have taken on an iconic status. It was bound to come with the passing of time. The show doesn’t cut us to the quick any more but the singing and dancing electrify and lift the spirits like nothing else.

Pat Ashworth