Cake - Tour / Lyric / The Other Palace

Just had to search for this thread, as noticed it’s opening venue is just down the road from me in Southampton in a couple of weeks. Zizi was brilliant in Mary Poppins and I like the somewhat Six-sounding storyline so may well pay it a visit. Would be keen to hear if anyone’s seen it previously…

Saw this at Leicester last night and really enjoyed it.
A very swift 70 minutes.
No swing just the vocal cast of six, unsure why.
Thought it was an exciting piece of theatre, genuinely amazing vocals, great performances.
The cast looked to be having a blast.

The preview on the 20th is £17.55 the date of Marie Antoinette birthday!
The rest of the week has top price of £60 maybe a little high for a 65 minute show!

Bought a £17.55 ticket for opening night on the basis that I loved Zizi Strallen in Mary Poppins!

I can assure you she’s very much not like Mary Poppins in this. Mary would blush, and reach into that carpet bag for a large towel to cover up with!

Really enjoyed this last night. I'd certainly go and see it again in its next incarnation.

Zizzi was great, and clearly having a ball- to say it's a different role to Mary Poppins is an understatement- and Renee was great too.

I'm off to google Marie Antoinette and Jeanne.

Absolutely loved it. And for the £17.55 preview price, it was a complete steal.

I adore Zizi and she was so brilliant as Marie Antoinette. Hilarious, vocally stunning and incredibly flexible!

I’d only seen Renee Lamb in the Emojiland concert previously and thought she was great here too.

Cake is absolutely wild and makes Six look like a child’s tea party. Some banging tunes and, with a bit of finessing, this could be a big hit.

Unfortunately I agree about the Lyric though. I was sat in Row E of the stalls and the two tallest men I’ve ever seen at a theatre sat down in front of me just before lights down. It was like watching the show between two pillars and my neck is paying for it today…

I won’t get a chance to see it again in this short run but, if I could, I’d be booking at least one more visit.

Four stars.

I saw this on its little UK tour at the start of the year and thought it was brilliant. I definitely prefer it to both Six and Hamilton. I did think it needed to be a bit longer though so I’m glad to hear they’ve extended it. I’m seeing it in a few days and excited to see what they’ve added and changed.

Seeing this in a moment!

Ruthie Henshall is here

Found this to be ok. Zizi is the highlight. Some of the songs are good (especially one of her solos). Everything with the Cardinal character needs a rethink - awful.

Saw the matinee and it probably needs to be more like "Six," not less, as Queen Zizi Strallen's Marie Antoinette is a five star camp smash in a story that gives lead character status to Renee Lamb's more uninteresting and confusing character.

More fabulous Queen, less of everything else, please.

Some spoilers follow. . .

In real life, Renee Lamb's Jeanne seems to have been a far greater villain than depicted here, an unrepentant thief who ruined the lives and reputations of everybody she came near, including Marie Antoinette. But the writers fictionalise and redeem her.

I don't mention that because I disapprove of historical revisionism, but because the writers seem to feel trapped by Marie Antoinette's downer of a historical fate. Why? Look at what "And Juliet" does with Juliet and consider a better sendoff for this glorious character.

Cos, embodied by a dazzling, camp and funny Zizi Strallen, she comes on with a shameless Madonna surface, elevating her fearless material girl status, with a hilarious new-wave-feminist sex-positive ode to her own "hot[ness]" and a winking comic riff on how she's thriving on spending our "taxes," and then suddenly, she reveals a deep empathetic bruised Lady Gaga heart, with her having been "married off at 15" and having to have sex with a man she's not attracted to.

And it's this combination of outrageous camp big fun action and sentimental big heart interior, combined with some amazingly infectious numbers that just make you want to jump up and cheer the character.

Roger Dipper's Jacobean style villain of a Cardinal, who molests girls and seemingly gets away with it, feels a bit icky, though Dipper does make you overlook that a bit by finding the comic caricature within.

Renee Lamb is fierce and raps and sings well, but her character is just unconvincing as a heroine, even if you go along with the writers' revisions to her character of Jeanne. This means that you come out a bit blah, whereas you'd have been cheering like you just paid £600 to see a Madonna-Lady Gaga joint gig if only the writers had kept the focus on Strallen's Antoinette, and had her do a Jacobean plot twist of her own, swap out with somebody else, and ride off into the sunset the camp larger-than-life Queen she obviously is lol.

Anyway, the whole ensemble is great, with Ope Sowande dancing up such an absolute storm in the background that you wish he and Strallen's Antoinette could just have escaped the downer plot and partied off together lol.

A 5 star Madonna/Gaga combo characterisation of Marie Antoinette by Zizi Strallen combines with a 2 star rating for the confusing, uninspiring, frustrating plot, making for 3 and a half stars overall for me.

I wouldn't miss what Strallen was doing for the world.

Well... lets start with the positives.

If Zizi Strallen wasn't already an established performer, this performance would but you on the map as a breakout star. She was absolutely fantastic, pitch perfect comedy timing, gorgeous voice, and the unique (and valuable!) ability to elevate the material given to her.

What a fun lighting design, a suped-up proper big style concert feel, really really fun. SOME of the songs (mostly Zizi's in the middle section of the show) were pretty fun and nice. This is where the show actually succeeded and thrived when it was trying to be its own thing.

Where it absolutely crashed was when it was being derivative of Six and Halimton; to the point that even the rap style sounded like Lin, and by tieing itself so closely to those two shows which (for the most part) are fairly accurate (I know they're not completely!) however after leaving Cake to read that practically NOTHING happened in real life and that basically the entire show is near fabricated felt like an absolute rip off, as the plot was already a little wonky and weak but i forgave it thinking 'well it's probably how most of it happened', and the show even TELLS YOU that's what it's going for with the cringe 'you get to tell YOUR story' lines. The costuming I assume was also the spare rack from &Juliet? With all these 'inspirations' it seems like the kind of you should read bout in theatre history books where they say 'it was clearly a cash grab pulling together from recent shows of the time who did something original and was just reductive, lazy, and boring'.

The Cardinal also made no sense. He is portrayed as this huge womanizer yet is the campest thing since Rob Madge! (Not a bad thing! and considering Paul Taylor Mills' working relationship with Rob you would assume either Rob was busy for these dates of Paul was inspired by their success and thought 'people like Rob, let's cast someone like them!). A simple fix would have been to have him act overtly macho and ladies-man-like during dialogue and then in songs have this switch to being camp, at least the juxtaposition would have been funny, and when you cannot speak, you sing, so there's a justification for that.

Please tell me why we needed an elf vape, kabab shop drunk food, and a little mermaid reference? Sadly the overzealous audience on my night gave it faux whoops and cheers but none of them made sense and just confused the plot. They made a joke where Marie Antoinette has a chocolate croissant for the first time and expects that to be the next big thing and THATS funny because it makes sense time period-wise (please don't quiz me on the history of the humble croissant!!) if smarter jokes like that were made instead of cheap grabs to 'MoDeRniZe' it were made it would have been better. And the lyrics.... repeating that line 'and I take it from your tax!' is funny once, cute twice, and useless and lazy the third, fourth, and fifth time.

I enjoyed the staging, the little platform revolve was fun, Zizi making a star entrance draped over the audience box was fun. Truly Zizi made it not a waste of my time.