It has been almost a decade since the musical Closer To Heaven, which features music written by the Pet Shop Boys, debuted in London in 2001. Since then, the play has been revived only twice, once for an Australian production, and once in Bristol, leaving the Uptown Players with the opportunity to boast an American premiere for the play written by Jonathan Harvey (Beautiful Thing, Babies). But the premiere status also raises a question: how could a musical with new songs written by one of the world’s most successful pop duos go nearly unperformed for ten years after its debut? The almost packed house on opening night at the Uptown Players’ new home, the Kalita Humphreys Theater, further drove home the point. The Pet Shop Boys are almost a sure draw. There must be something wrong with this play.
As it turns out, there is a lot wrong with Closer to Heaven, primarily the matching of a slight trifle of a story with music that is surprisingly unsatisfying and unfit to carry two-and-a-half hours of drama. In Closer to Heaven, we don’t get the Pet Shop Boys’ at their sly, sophisticated finest. Lyrics are forced, deliberate, clumsily constructed, and belabored by self-conscious character exposition and painfully obvious rhyming. As performed in the Uptown Players, the orchestrations feel thin and slightly canned. This is a play, not a pop concert, so the music is held back, not allowed to fill up the space with the layered, textured synth harmonies that make the Pet Shop Boys’ music so emotionally satisfying. The pop group wrote almost all new material for the play, but I couldn’t help but wish they had worked some more of their proven songs into the score. The musical takes place in the decadent years of late 1990s London, and It’s A Sin or West End Girls would have fit in easily, and next to these play-specific numbers, they would have brought down the house.
The play is about a young Irish man, Dave (Evan Fuller), who moves to London with aspirations of singing and dancing stardom. He gets his first dancing gig at a gay nightclub, and although he swears he is not gay (his nickname is “Straight Dave”), dancers and proprietors alike are convinced otherwise. He strikes up a romance with Shell Christian (Lee Jamison Wadley), the estranged daughter of nightclub Vic (Jason Kane), but eventually, Dave begins to wonder about his sexuality and his feelings for the local drug dealer, Mile End Lee (Clayton Younkin), who supplies the nightclub’s crew of dancers and employees. When Dave finally begins seeing Lee (a relationship that starts, romantically-enough, on his knees in a bathroom stall to the top left of the stage), it sparks multiple catastrophes. Shell is heartbroken and turns to drugs; her father, witnessing his daughter’s demise, relapses into his own habits. All the while two older characters hover over the action: the washed-up, raspy voiced Billie Trix (Morgana Shaw), who is both mentor and temptress to the young characters, and Bob Saunders (Coy Covington), a bullying and sketchy music producer who wants the spirited, impetuous Dave to become the front man for a boy band he is putting together.
Dave resists Saunders’ sexual and professional advances, and as he struggles to remain true to his convictions – and his new lover, Lee – Closer to Heaven becomes a parable about personal integrity and standing up for what you believe is right. If there was any doubt about this, the big closing number, “Positive Role Model,” serves up the tale’s moral on a silver platter with its peppy recantations of the line “I need a positive role model, role model.” It is cheesy and forced, but catchy, and pared with the enthusiastic dance numbers, remarkably digestible.
Andy Redon’s set is a luscious construction that evokes a Twilight meets Phantom mood, with its vampiric, baroque flourishes and repetitive cross motifs. Two rising staircases allow some of the dance numbers to unfold on multiple levels, but the levels also allow that all-important grimy boy’s bathroom to sit elevated and in full view. Sexual secretes can’t stay hidden in this play. There is also a center section that spins, allowing a bed to pop on stage, where Straight Dave enjoys simulated sex with either Shell or Lee.
Despite the plot unevenness and weak story line, the Uptown Players’ cast found its moments to shine. Evan Fuller’s Dave captures the right sense of spunk, but more importantly, the right vocal tenor. There are difficulties with adapting the Pet Shop Boys’ brand of pop to the stage. The band’s music is subtly dramatic, characterized by underplayed tunes with simple melodies and straight-forward construction. It is the serene vocal quality of Neil Tennant’s voice that help their songs rise above the mundane. Fuller has an ear for Tenant’s particular vocal quality, and he often finds the right nasally resonance with his enunciations, holding notes until they find the intended melodramatic swoon. The rest of the singing is patcy, and in the case of ensemble players, occasionally shrill. Even someone like Jason Kane, who possesses a phenomenal voice, strikes a tone that is too rough and aggravated for the Pet Shop Boys’ melody lines. Kane sings his part well; the problem is the Pet Shop Boys don’t write music dynamic enough to bend to so many different personalities.
Morgana Shaw is the cream that rises to the top in the Uptown Players’ production. Bawdy, flirtatious, explosive, but coy, Shaw plays a kind of spider lady, who directs action by influencing the young characters with her particularly wry, jaded reading of the world. Her jokes about former sexual escapades are peppered with cutting sarcasm, making her the only character with a sense of soul that stands out against the bubble gum incarnations of the rest of the cast. And along with a few delightful and humorously-staged dance numbers (the simulated debauchery of “Caligula, Darling” is only upstaged by the sumptuous triple action of “Vampire”), Shaw somehow manages to take this weak musical and salvage from it the bit of fun we had hoped for.
