Musik continues at the Leicester Square Theatre, London until 1 March 2020.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Judging by the stone-cold faces of some of my fellow reviewers, Musik might well be one of those Marmite musicals you either love or hate. It’s rude, it’s scatalogical, it’s loud, it’s chaotic. And it’s absolutely hilarious. I loved every minute of it.
“I eat musik. I breathe musik. I AM musik! Even my clitoris is shaped like a treble clef!” Well, yes, perhaps, but this one-woman show arguably pushes the definition of “musical”.
Frances Barber – the whirlwind, the stoppable force of nature that is the mythical Billie Trix – can’t really sing all that well. She can act – boy, can she! – but she struggles with the high notes (“high” indeed – sniff!) and the pitch occasionally goes awry. And yet, this is exactly how we’d expect her washed-up, delusional drug-addled Trix to sound. She absolutely nails it.
Billie Trix is the outrageous creation of Jonathan Harvey (Beautiful Thing, Gimme Gimme Gimme) and the true star of the 2001 musical Closer to Heaven, written by Harvey and the Pet Shop Boys. This sorta-sequel is much more sprawling and off-the-cuff – a boozy night out with a coked-up eccentric that sounds like it might be stream of consciousness but in fact is a masterclass in comedic characterisation by one of the UK’s finest actresses. “It’s not a one-woman show, it’s open-heart surgery. Pass me the knife!”
Our Trix struts on stage in impressively high-heeled boots, cat-calling Madonna for ripping off her style (“I was wearing this WAY before Madonna,” she hisses as she tears off her eyepatch and tosses it aside. “That bitch stole my look!”) Then over the course of the next hour, the Germanic vokalist recounts the preposterous, Munchausen-like story of her life – a roller-coaster ride through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s music and art scenes.
From her humble folk-singer beginnings in Berlin, Trix (or Hildegarde Schimelpfenig, to use her real name) sneaks aboard a ship to New York, finding time for a quick dalliance with a fellow stowaway named Otto the Pizza Boy (“he had hair like shredded wheat and a penis like a walnut whip”). Otto, as you later find out, goes on to make his fortune in America.
Once in New York, Trix forms a folk duo with Nico and joins The Factory, where she feeds a depressed Andy Warhol a comforting tin of soup and inadvertently sets his career on a bright new trajectory (cue “Little Can of Soup, a ballad about Campbell’s”); she jams with “four crazy guys from Liverpool”; she travels to Paris to play the country of Norway in a movie called The Masturbation of Race (“my fjords were stunning!”); Salvador Dalí builds her a coffin; Jean-Paul Sartre calls her pretentious; Tracey Emin pees on the phone-box that she’s made her home in Soho Square.
This unreliable memoir is a dizzying pinball between every major artist and musician of the past 40 years, all of whom are influenced in some way by the Zelig- or Mitty-like Trix. (Or, for the younger kids who might not get all of the references, Forrest Gump-like.) Harvey’s script isn’t subtle but it’s barbed from start to finish with to-die-for one-liners that I struggled to note down, such was the speed at which they came. A dream part for any performer and Barber absolutely embodies the mythic Liza-meets-Winehouse Billie Trix.
Dotted throughout the manic monologue are (six?) new songs by the synth-pop duo Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, arching in style from 60s ballads to 80s disco. I’m not particularly a fan of the Pet Shop Boys so the music did little for me but Barber’s monstrously good performance ensures that the so-so songs and her cracking voice all add to the bathos of the whole thing – her foul-mouthed Trix is ultimately a tragic wash-up… a never-quite-has-been with no discernible talent for anything other than self-preservation. But she’s undeniably loveable and deserves to go down as one of theatre’s most iconic females.
You don’t need to be a Pet Shop Boys aficionado to enjoy this show, and even if you’re decidedly not a fan, you still shouldn’t let this put you off. You really can’t afford to miss out on Barber’s tour de force performance.
Craig Glenday
Tickets for Musik at the Leicester Square Theatre, London are available HERE.
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