It's a boy- meet-boy romance.

Interviewer: Rupert Smith
From: The Guardian / 15.05.2001
Views: 15481

With tap dancing gladiators. The Pet Shop Boys tell
Rupert Smith about their new musical.

There's an old gay joke: if the Sistine Chapel had been
decorated by a heterosexual, it would have been
wallpapered. The same principle applies to musicals. If
you let straight men loose on the genre, you get Ben
Elton, football and the Troubles. Unleash gay men, and
you get West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate and the works of
Stephen Sondheim. So when it was announced that the Pet
Shop Boys had teamed up with playwright Jonathan Harvey
(Beautiful Thing, Gimme Gimme Gimme), nobody was
expecting anything laddish. In fact, their musical,
Closer to Heaven, which opens at the end of the month,
makes Funny Girl look like a Guy Ritchie movie.


"We never sat down and said, 'Let's write a gay
musical,'" says Neil Tennant, the Pet Shop Boy who
actually speaks. "The gay element of the story is about
transformation, about growing up and realising what you
want to be. That's a very musical subject." Maybe - but
Closer to Heaven is also set in a gay nightclub, features
a cast of dancers who strip down to boots and sequined
G-strings, and revolves around a faded female icon of the
Judy Garland variety. All this and show tunes too.


Closer to Heaven has been a long time coming. Pet Shop
Boys fans won't be surprised by the move: their songs,
and particularly their live shows, have always been
theatrical. In 1997 they had a residency at the Savoy
Theatre and released a version of Somewhere from West
Side Story. Many of their best songs (Rent, It's a Sin,
Being Boring) sound like hits from non-existent shows.
Closer to Heaven has been on the back burner since 1994,
when the BBC suggested they should collaborate on a
musical with Harvey, then riding high on the success of
Beautiful Thing. "He'd also written a TV play called West
End Girls, about two East 17 fans coming to London to
meet Brian Harvey, so we knew we were on the same
wavelength," says Tennant. 'But I was never keen on doing
a musical for television. It's a lot of work for
something that's just going to be shown once, so we
decided to do it properly, for the theatre. We started
writing in 1996, and it's been a sporadic process ever
since." Some of the songs - Closer to Heaven, Vampires,
In Denial - have been waiting in the wings for a few
years, and found their way on to the last Pet Shop Boys
album, Nightlife.


With a draft version of the show prepared, Harvey (book),
Tennant (lyrics) and fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe
(music) financed a workshop in May last year to find out
if any of it actually worked. Frances Barber was drafted
in to play Billie Tricks, the drug-addled mother hen/rock
chick, and was such a hit that more songs were added
(despite Barber's claims that "I can't sing, not even in
the bath") and her role expanded. In between writing and
gigging commitments, the final version of the show was
assembled and a venue found: the Arts Theatre, near
Leicester Square. "To me this feels like an off-Broadway
opening," says Tennant. "I didn't want to compete with
the big West End stuff. The Arts Theatre is a small
venue, just a plain black box, no gilt, no cherubs. The
original plan was to stage the show in a non-theatrical
venue. That was our manifesto: a musical with
contemporary pop music in a non-theatrical venue. But if
we'd waited for the perfect place to come along, we'd
never have got it off the ground."


They are eager to distance themselves from
run-of-the-mill West End shows, and the gay-sex-and-drugs
milieu is a far cry from Les Misérables across the
street. But not that far: Closer to Heaven is produced by
Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group and, despite
the clubland trappings, it still tells a boy-meets-girl
(then-meets-boy) story in which the characters sing songs
about their feelings. There are dancers, some of whom
have been rescued from other West End shows such as
Napoleon. There's no orchestra (the music is nearly all
produced elecronically), but there are big numbers. "I
appear at one point on a huge sofa in the shape of a pair
of lips," says Barber. "Then there's my rap number about
Caligula, with all the dancers in tiny gladiator costumes
doing a tap dance."


"What I like about musicals," says Jonathan Harvey, "is
that you get high emotion - why else would people burst
into song? - and you get spectacle. I'm learning fast
that people don't go to a musical to hear the words. They
go for the music and the visual excitement of it. I was
hooked on musicals from a very early age: when I was five
years old I was up in my bedroom dancing to My Fair Lady
while my brother was playing football down the street.
There wasn't much hope for me, was there? My mother used
to tear her hair out."


Tennant and Lowe cite similar formative experiences. "One
of the first films I ever saw was The Sound of Music,"
says Lowe, in a rare burst of articulacy. "I just
remember that magnificent crescendo at the beginning,
before she launches into, 'The hills are alive.' My
little brother was so terrified he ran out of the cinema
and never came back." Lowe senior stayed, though, and has
dipped in and out of musicals ever since, learning a
thing or two about a good tune along the way. Tennant's
is a more scholarly interest: he discovered Sondheim in
the 1980s and has been an ardent follower ever since.
"The first Sondheim show I saw was Follies, and I
remember thinking Losing My Mind would make a good hit
record. So we went away and recorded it with Liza
Minnelli and loads of people thought we wrote it."


Given this track record, it seems inevitable that
Tennant, Lowe and Harvey should write a musical together,
even create their very own camp icon. Billie Tricks is an
amalgam of Nico, Marianne Faithfull, Debbie Harry and
every other wayward rock'n'roll queen. "I see her as an
Absolutely Fabulous version of Nico," says Tennant.
"She's someone who was a big star, who takes herself
absolutely seriously and is often unintentionally funny
for that reason. Sincerity is the essence of true camp.
When Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow, she didn't wink
at the audience and go, 'This is so flipping camp, I
can't believe I'm singing it.' She meant every word."
Billie's big 1960s hit (which should, with luck, be on
sale in the foyer) is called Run Girl Run, a protest
number inspired by the famous Vietnam photograph of the
naked, napalmed child. (Sample lyric: "Run girl run away
from the sun/ Napalm burns all over your body . . . the
western world would like to say sorry.")


Barber has flung herself into the role "too far, perhaps.
I've started going out every night with the dancers, and
I've become a mother figure to them. They fix my
eyelashes for me and they tell me about all the new party
drugs that I've never even heard of, let alone taken. I
was completely intimidated by them at first: the boys are
incredibly handsome with washboard stomachs, the girls
are all beautiful and sexy. I felt old and wrinkled, and
I've been going to the gym three times a day just so that
I don't look grotesque standing next to them. Now we're
like a little family. They tell me all their secrets
about depilatory creams and shaving their hairy arses.
I'm learning a lot, fast."


Barber may steal the show, but there's plenty more on
offer. Choreo-graphy is by Peter "Billy Elliott" Darling.
Paul Keating (who starred in the West End production of
Tommy) is the male lead Straight Dave, and there's enough
music to make up a cast album that will be released later
in the year. In theory, it's an irresistible combination.
Tennant isn't given to blowing his own trumpet, but he's
made it clear that he thinks Closer to Heaven is a
blueprint for an ailing theatrical form. "You look at
some of the shows that are on in the West End, and you
just think, 'Why?' They're so obviously not going to
work. There seems to be an idea that you can make a
musical out of any old subject, but things like the life
of Napoleon just aren't appropriate. Closer to Heaven is
a much more traditional musical. It's a love story, and
it's about show business. We've set it in a world that we
know and love, and that will come across."


"You'll come out of the show smiling and singing," says
Lowe. "It's definitely a feelgood evening. Although of
course this is Pet Shop Boys, so it's feelgood with a
touch of feelbad. That's how we like it."

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