Just your everyday genderqueer pastoral musical comedy, Head Over Heels brings its pansexual utopia to Broadway. A blank-verse jukeboxer scored to The Go-Go’s back catalog, it’s a live-your-best-life riff on Philip Sidney’s Elizabethan prose phenom Arcadia. It is pretty silly and pretty dumb. Mostly it’s a lot of fun. That beat they’ve got? It’s infectious.
The story mirrors a Shakespeare comedy, only busier and slightly lewder. King Basilius (Jeremy Kushnier) and Gynecia (Rachel York, blame that character name on Sidney), are the rulers of beat-rich Arcadia. One princess, Pamela (Bonnie Milligan), keeps refusing suitors and the other, Philoclea (Alexandra Socha) is being wooed by a shepherd (Andrew Durand), but the kingdom keeps time until Basilius receives four perilous prophecies from the fabulous, non-binary oracle Pythio (Peppermint, of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame). If they’re fulfilled, Arcadia will perish.
The king does what any reasonable king would do: he takes the entire kingdom on a road trip. Cue Get Up and Go. Are you curious about the lion attack, the cross-dressing, the cave sex, the side trip to Lesbos complete with mermaid chorus, the mother-and-child reunion? My lips are sealed.
Like SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, another show that takes a rambunctious approach to its source material, Head Over Heels is kind of great without ever being especially good. It’s Xanadu with fewer rollerskates, Mamma Mia! with more corsetry. Swoony, splashy, frisky, zippy it’s a power-pop crowd pleaser that plays fast and very loose with its prose romance, ignoring pretty much anything dark or difficult.
That scene where the men violently slaughter an angry mob? It would have been a great fit for We Don’t Get Along, but it’s not here. All that killjoy stuff about good governance and personal responsibility? Yeah that’s gone, too, leaving more time for a Rocky Horror Show-style shadow sex scene. Because love comes first, of course. Is that bit scored to Heaven Is a Place on Earth? Why even ask.
The book, written by Jeff Whitty, who also gets a conceived by credit, and adapted by James Magruder, is giddy and sometimes clever. “Speak English,” Philoclea complains to her besotted, wordy suitor, “Not Eclogue.” As for the score, brightly performed by an exuberant all-female band, it’s the top 40 hits – Mad About You, Vacation – that translate best, though there’s a nifty use of Skidmarks on My Heart. The set, by Julian Crouch, is a cheerful cartoon. Arianne Phillips’s costumes are a sexed-up protest against sumptuary laws.
What puts Head Over Heels over the top are a couple of genius comic performances and the play’s blithe conjuring of a better, hornier world with a girl or a boy or a non-binary plural for just about everyone. As Musidorus, Philoclea’s devoted transvestite admirer, the goofy Durand again claims his place as one of the beautiful lunatics of musical comedy. He’s a maniac on the floor. And as Pamela, who eventually realizes her love for Taylor Iman Jones’s pert Mopsa, Milligan is a one-woman maelstrom, gaily preening in Beautiful and blissfully flipped out during How Much More. Milligan is beautiful. And she isn’t petite, worth mentioning only because it’s atypical of performers cast in pretty princess roles. How nice to see a utopia available in all sizes.
The moral is a little soppy. Most morals are. Live your truth. Follow your bliss. Be here now. But under Michael Mayer’s perky, occasionally frantic direction, there’s too much goodwill and too many good wigs to resist it. Also, the bar at the Hudson serves Frosé. Might as well fall in line.
