Closer to Heaven - Turbine Theatre

It's expensive. £42.50 is a lot for that venue.

I still booked for it though. 8th June

42.50 to listen to a train overhead every 2 minutes

Oh my God this is fabulous! Not usually one to get excited about casting, but Queen Frances Ruffelle - take (more of) my money. What a perfect fit!

Glenn is an interesting choice - really wouldn't have had him down as a Straight Dave but maybe the role's been butched up lol. Anyway he can SING so another excellent choice.

Not sure what you mean, because I've never heard of Glenn Adamson.  Do you perceive him as more butch or less butch than how the character has been previously portrayed?!

Very butch! He's just lead the Bat Out of Hell tour as Strat!

(Although now am thinking about it, am re-appraising this....)

Also very MT/rock type voice. Think he'd done things like American Idiot etc beforehand. He's just not someone that in a million years would have crossed my mind for Dave but fascinated to see it.

I've seen two previous versions of this - the amateur premiere in Brighton about 2010 and the Union Theatre one about 10 years ago.

I thought the amateur one was FAR better in every way!!

Spookily I was only watching clips of the original production on youtube yesterday, as I'd been watching an interview with "Jonathan Pie" and it reminded me that he (well, Tom Walker) played Mile End Lee. He was cute back then!!

SIDE NOTE: I often wished Elaine Paige had recorded Friendly Fire - would have been magnificent!

It's a shaky start, the words don't fit that well, may have been better 'speak sung' until the song gets more determinedly on beat, but that happens quite quickly and I liked it from there. A bit of a Marianne Faithful quality to it vocally; I've forgotten when this is set and what kind of rock diva she's meant to be. Perhaps for younger audiences today (even if it's still set 25 years ago) Marianne Faithful isn't a very resonant reference; I'd say Hazel O'Connor or Toyah Wilcox type icons may be more believable but they're probably a mystery to many too, lol.

Yes, very easy from the new tube station.

From Victoria? It's a bit of a hike!

I saw this years ago at The Arts Theatre with Paul Keating (I think) and Frances Barber as Billie Trix who was just fab.
Saw it again at the Union Theatre which was not so good.

Yes Frances Barber became morally a bit of a disaster area for me. I loved her in the original of this and she acted and sang the role so well. Her behaviour around the whole thing also really exuded gay icon.

Then in the last 10 years she has morphed through the stages of trans questioner, trans denier and now reached the stage of full on JK Rowling and Sharron Davies anti trans obsession, bordering on hate speech. It's depressing to see. So very much no longer a gay icon in my eyes of any sort.

I was surprised the PSB worked with her on the Billie Trix one woman only follow up to this to be honest (at Leicester Square theatre - what was it called?) as she'd made her views pretty clear by then.

I've seen this a few times too. The Arts Theatre production also included Louis Spence.

Useless fact: Did any of you watch the Netflix series Mindhunter, with Jonathan Groff? He had a partner in the show, Bill Trench, well his wife in the series was played by Stacey Roca, who played Shell in the original cast of Closer To Heaven, and is on the recording.

I do wish they had put the full 10 minute opening (My Night) on the recording instead of hacking it down to 3 mins something. It was recorded and can be found on YT.