The Pope vapes, Michelangelo uses Zoom, and Leonardo da Vinci foretells the career of Marisa Tomei. This is not the Renaissance as the textbooks teach it. Dylan MarcAurele’s musical comedy mashes up Medici Florence and high-camp modernity to trace two friends’ journey from gay schoolmates (bit of a historical stretch, that) to the greatest artists of their age. It couldn’t be trashier but in the spaces between art history and anachronism, flamboyant rudeness and lyrical wit, there’s fun to be had.
No point pretending Pop Off, Michelangelo! takes much interest in these Old Masters’ art, nor in the era. But it’s all over their queerness – atoning for which drives Michelangelo to dump his BFF and seek Sistine Chapel salvation. But can they swerve the attentions of religious firebrand Savonarola, in an age turning increasingly cynical thanks to pizza chef and aspiring philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli?
It is, in short, a kitsch Renaissance cartoon; subtlety is not its selling point. “You truly made marble your bitch,” Michelangelo’s teacher tells him, while Leonardo’s arrest for sodomy is apologised for as follows: “I was so stupid. I thought Savonarola was a stripper.” But if Da Vinci-style depth of field is beyond it, Pop Off, Michelangelo! frolics enjoyably in the foreground. Careerist but concerned Max Eade and sly, soppy Aidan MacColl are an engaging Michelangelo and Leonardo, plotting their respective paths between safety and self-expression.
Sashaying around in his golden cape, Michael Marouli’s Pope makes for an amusingly unlikely gatekeeper of the hetero status quo. Laura Sillett gives good “mwa ha ha” as the villainous friar, and Aoife Haakenson contributes an apropos-of-little showstopper in character as a certain movie star from the 21st century. The pop score is perfectly winning, even if Michelangelo’s ballad about God and Jesus fits ill with the part of the story it’s meant to tell. The show’s freewheeling spirit, though, which twins twerking and 1400s Tuscany, and has a notorious puritan fanatic teased for dressing by Temu, is very easy to submit to.
