Good luck generating festive cheer on the same day your show – like every show at this venue – has been Covid-cancelled until the new year. But if that’s a bittersweet backdrop to Le Gateau Chocolat and Jonny Woo’s cheap-and-cheerful songs-from-the-shows cabaret, the duo refuse to surrender to it. With this follow-up to 2018’s A Night at the Musicals, the so-called “ebony and ivory of drag” deliver precisely what fans would wish for: high camp, affectionate send-ups, OTT costumes and flashes of flesh – all underpinned, like the sturdy foundations to a garish building, by Le Gateau’s resonant bass-baritone, still rumbling somewhere in your guts when you’re halfway home.
That’s partly down to over-amplification: whether sung, spoken or pretend-squabbled, the show is often aggressively strident on the mic. The best moments are the most delicate – Le Gateau’s fragile take on Whitney Houston, say, before that number devolves into a stompalong. Lacking (by his own admission) his partner’s musical skills, Woo supplies a few lip-synch numbers, multi-roling amusingly to At the End of the Day from Les Mis, and doing a striptease to Sondheim and Jule Styne’s Some People. This is very much the kind of show that expects – and receives – whoops of applause when a skimpy outfit is shed and a skimpier one revealed.
“Lower your expectations,” we’re instructed at the start – and sure enough, the show does nothing more than it says on the tin. But it does that with infectious pleasure, and a heightened sense from Le Gateau and Woo of their own ridiculousness. The moment is precious when the former struts on stage, swaddled more like a furball than a feline, to croon from Lloyd Webber’s Cats – while Woo contributes a droll cameo, midway through Le Gateau’s Little Mermaid number, as a rubber-headed shark. By the end, it’s more singalong than show, as the pair take requests, deploy a Sound of Music medley while dressed as matching Marias, and end with a crowd-pleaser from Grease. Our current winter of discontent feels a long way from Summer Nights – but Le Gateau and Woo’s cheeky cabaret is a fun way to take your mind off it.
Now That’s What We Call Musicals, Soho theatre, London, returns on 4 January, runs to 22 January.
