Live to Tell continues at the Omnibus Theatre, London until 18 February 2023.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
In a world where so many artists’ or writers’ back catalogues have been turned into jukebox musicals, why has one never been written around the prodigious multi-decade output that forms Madonna’s body of work?
Such is the premise for Brian Mullin’s Live to Tell, at least initially. In a thinly veiled version of himself, Mullin plays Brian, a writer with limited credits to his name but who intends to construct the perfect story to pitch to Madonna’s people.
Many jukebox shows either follow along a biographical route (think Beautiful, Sunny Afternoon or most successfully of all, Jersey Boys) or take the songs and put them into an original concept (Mamma Mia!, On Your Feet! or, erm, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again). Brian’s pitch, tentatively titled Borderline, falls somewhere between the two, creating a fictional female protagonist who, much like Madonna herself, moves from Michigan to 1980s New York and falls in with the crowd of young artists and dancers with whom she begins to cultivate her first look.
As Brian develops his ideas, he faces resistance from both his agent and his boyfriend (both played, like all other onstage roles, by Dan de la Motte). A more significant level of encouragement comes from his doctor – but from that angle also comes concern about the side effects of Brian’s long-term medication for his HIV.
For Live to Tell shares something in common with the subject of Brian’s intended musical: a constant sense of reinvention. What starts as an amusing parody of jukebox musicals soon becomes clear that it’s something more profound and more personal. Just as a PowerPoint slide that Brian is using to chart the rise and fall of the protagonist’s journey morphs into a graph of how someone’s immune system reacts when they have HIV, so too Mullin’s story transmutes into an exploration of what life is like living with the virus.
In recent years we’ve come to think that because effective antiretroviral therapies can ensure that people with HIV can manage their symptoms for the rest of their life and that when their viral load is undetectable, they can’t transmit the virus to anyone else, an HIV diagnosis is not a big thing – or, like Brian’s boyfriend, we can pretend that someone’s HIV status doesn’t exist.
Mullin skewers that idea, showing that a lifetime of ongoing pharmaceutical treatment still has its costs. The drug regime he is on is affecting his brain, causing mood swings and depression: they may also affect his ability to finish his ideas for the musical.
As Brian the character descends into a spiral of self-destructive behaviour, Mullin the playwright always keeps a thread of humour to balance his character’s real pain. He is helped by de la Motte’s constant presence and interjections from Madonna (played in voiceover by impresionist Nadya Ginsburg), while Josh Anio Grigg’s projections and some effective lighting design by Alex Thomas enhance the production further.
Throughout, director Deirdre McLaughlin steers Mullin’s work through several more reinventions, until by the end, the lines between Mullin and his character Brian are not so much blurred as obliterated. In the play’s closing moments, we get a more authentic sense of where the real Brian Mullin sits within his semi-autobiographical work. It’s a conclusion that cements the power of Mullin’s exploration, reinforcing that for all its theatrical and fictional trappings, at the heart of his work is a deeper, richer truth.
It is no spoiler to say that there is no Madonna musical by the time Live to Tell concludes. But what there is instead is a moving reexamination of the singer, what she means to her fans, and what living with HIV can be like.
As someone who has always been passionate about standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, for people with HIV, and for creative freedom, one hopes that Madonna would find what the rest of us can see in Mullin’s work: Live to Tell is a play to cherish.
Scott Matthewman
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