STRICTLY FANS ONLY
Dance star’s rock show fails to find its feet
Rock Of Ages (New Wimbledon Theatre and Touring) Verdict: Let the people rock! ★★★✩✩ Is God Is (Royal Court, London) Verdict: Deliciously twisted ★★★★✩
SO IT’S tennis rackets for air guitar, hairbrushes for microphones and ear plugs for health and safety: Rock Of Ages is back on the road. Starring the nicest guy from Strictly, Kevin Clifton, as the baddest guy in this Eighties rock musical spoof: Stacee Jaxx.
Yes, it’s all in the worst possible taste — and post-show tinnitus is guaranteed. The gleefully confected story tells of Sherrie from Kansas, arriving on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip with dreams of becoming an actress. Falling for bashful wannabe rock god Drew, she’s seduced and cast aside by legend and love rat Stacee.
Let’s face it, though; no one is here for the story. The largely female audience on the night I went had clearly rocked up for the glam metal belters.
They’d come to heckle and howl their heads off — and did so right from the off (first up: Starship’s We Built This City).
They swayed along with Sherrie and Drew to Foreigner’s Waiting For A Girl Like You; and turned positively vulpine for I Want To Know What Love Is, when Stacee takes Sherrie on a ‘date’ in the gents’ lavvy.
And yet, the story keeps getting in the way, reducing the songs to snatches that rarely settle.
Joe Gash’s narrator Lonny could do more to keep the pace up between numbers, instead of belabouring off-colour gags.
Sweet and tuneful Rhiannon Chesterman lifts the energy as Sherrie; and Clifton is splendidly dreadful as over-sexed Stacee, sporting a rock wig, spray-on white jeans and winkle picker cowboy boots. But it’s Luke Walsh, as Drew, who stops the show, by holding a soaring note for what feels like a whole minute. Otherwise, Nick Winston’s loud and lewd production is too often too loose, and there are way too many willy gags.
Andrew Carthy’s Franz is camper than a row of tents.
Maybe two rows. But he’s just about worth it for the line: ‘I’m not gay, I’m German!’
They may be having a good time, but it’s the actors’ job to cue us up so we can have a good time, too, and sing like nobody’s listening.
ACRACKING play at the Royal Court!? Believe it. Whether by accident or design, the flop factory has finally hit on something worth seeing: a twisted Tarantino-ish, Kill Bill-style revenge story called Is God Is.
Our femmes fatales are twin sisters from Kentucky who discover their long-lost mother is still alive, but living in a nursing home with dreadful burns, after their father tried to kill her 18 years earlier.
Looking like Davros from Doctor
Who, the mother orders her girls to serve revenge on their dad.
What unfolds is a buddy story/ road trip with the implacable logic of Greek tragedy.
That’s matched by Ola Ince’s snappy production, and Chloe Lamford’s cartoonish design — including a photo of a snaking desert road, emblazoned on a vast curtain hanging behind the girls’ fateful destination: a roll-on yellow house with teal shutters, somewhere in California.
Tamara Lawrance and Adelayo Adedayo play the faintly bored, brutally resolute twins.
And Cecilia Noble chills the blood as their bed-bound, pagangodhead Mama, who demands they make sure their father is ‘real dead… all the way dead’.
That mix of dippyness and darkness make this show very niche, but also a twisted delight.