Sydney's soul sisters make Priscilla's trip in the desert worthwhile
Robert Cushman, National Post · Friday, Oct. 29, 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/Sydney+soul+sisters+make+Priscilla+trip+desert+worthwhile/3747835/story.htmlAs you may have heard, Priscilla Queen of the Desert doesn't have a title character, it has a title bus. In this vehicle three Australian drag queens, Tick, Bernadette and Felicia, make their way from Sydney, where they live, to Alice Springs, where they have a booking. It's also where Tick, who's having a Cage aux Folles type of storyline, hopes to be reunited with his son, though in this case, the son is not a young adult but an adoring six-year-old.
It's a long way from Sydney to Alice -- 3,000 kilometres according to the program -- and there's not a lot that a stage show, as opposed to the movie that Priscilla originally was, can do to show us the variations in the territory between. The authors, Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott (adapting their own screenplay), settle for showing us signposts bearing such outlandish, or outbackish, names as Broken Hill, Woop Woop (invented) and Coober Pedy (real) and having the characters make jokes about them. Three times, our odd triple get off the bus to patronize a local bar and three times they hit trouble. The level of hostility they encounter, and the strength of their reaction to it, increases each time. At one point the bus gets defaced by hillbilly gay bashers, and has to be spray-painted new. A musical has to pass the time somehow. Still, all this stopping and bar-hopping gets to feel repetitive.
