Picture: Luke Dyson
Oscar at the Crown continues at The Crown, London until 31 August 2025.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
In the near future, a world that has turned to fascism has all but destroyed itself, forcing some of its queer population to take refuge in an underground bunker. Their leader, Wilde, gives everybody else names culled from various strands of the Real Housewives reality franchise, and inducts them into a quasi-religious adoration of Julie Cooper, a character from 2000s teen soap The OC. And in the evenings, they perform a musical about Wilde’s 19th century namesake, Oscar. But the arrival of a new outsider causes this routine, and Wilde’s hold over the bunker’s other residents, to be called into question.
At least, that’s the gist one can glean from this production, now established in a custom constructed dance club on Tottenham Court Road after its creation in New York was followed in 2023 by an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run. One could charitably describe this as an immersive promenade production, the action taking place across several stages and moving platforms. One can have the perfect vantage point one moment, with a view of the stage and crystal-clear audio clarity, and the next the action is over the other side of the space, with the amplified singing both garbled and competing with conversations from people who have got bored with being so far away from the performance.
Book writer Mark Mauriello clearly relishes his lead role as Wilde, a brash combination of The Joker, Cabaret’s Emcee and Frank ‘N’ Furter, albeit lacking in the veneer of charisma that makes those characters’ dark sides work. The bunker’s other residents have much less individual characters to contend with, save for Elizabeth Chalmers’ introducing resident, who Wilde casts in the role of Oscar’s wife, Constance, and who by the end is questioning just why her character has been airbrushed out of her husband’s story.
Songwriter Andrew Barret Cox’s compositions, who has composed a few tracks for the global Drag Race franchise, ally with that series’ campy, disposable vibe, all perfectly serviceable in situ but utterly forgettable once they’re over. That moment when a song is over is on occasion later in coming, too: one gets the point about Julie Cooper from the OC a verse into a song of adulation for her, yet it still keeps going and going and going without adding anything further.
The plot ping-pongs between the re-creation of Oscar Wilde’s life, especially his relationship with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, and the life of the characters in the bunker. The parallels between Victorian gentlemen conducting their recreational sex lives in private and this mythical future where all queer activity has been forced literally underground is a little more heavy-handed than it believes itself to be.
Some of the visuals, when they are actually visible, are engaging at first glance. But the immersive approach does give a slightly closer glimpse of costuming than one may be used to, and the post-apocalyptic outfits – fishnets, rubber armour, vinyl corsetry and a few fabric embellishments – do not feel particularly original. More impressive is the venue itself, constructed especially for this production in the basement of the building that also houses Monopoly Lifesized. The graffiti-clad industrial aesthetic is barely more original than the costuming, but there is a sense that the execution, especially with its judicious placement of televisions, provides, among other things, CCTV-like views of performance areas that might otherwise not be visible.
Oscar at the Crown is most definitely an experience unlike any other musical theatre venture currently playing in London. And that enhances the disappointment that there are so many pieces of the staging by director Shira Milikowsky that don’t quite work. Because the idea of an immersive dance musical in a space such as this should work a whole lot better than it does.
Scott Matthewman
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