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Barbra Streisand fans should rouse themselves from their cryogenic slumbers and get down to this über-camp confection that’s flown in from New York. Starring Michael Urie from ‘Ugly Betty’, it concerns Alex, a struggling gay actor working in the shopping mall in Barbra’s LA basement. Yes, apparently she really does have a shopping mall in her basement to store her collection of antiques, costumes and trinkets. As Urie’s character Alex says, ‘it’s like when Dorothy goes from sepia to Technicolor.’
Jonathan Tolins’s play will not be up everyone’s boulevard. Alex is a stereotypical camp airhead and an interior design fetishist, eventually forced to chose between his mildly cynical boyfriend and being a slave in Barbra’s world of kitsch. There are in-jokes about corners of the mind, ‘Yentl’ and scatter cushions, plus a range of incidental characters from a brat in Disneyland to Barbra’s nice-but-dim second husband. Inevitably there is much adoration of the equine Hollywood starlet herself.
At almost two hours without interval, Stephen Brackett’s production is a long haul for a one-man show. But Urie pulls out all the stops to make every second count, while his blue-eyed, black-haired preppy looks also run to a vast repertoire of histrionics. His tongue is not only firmly in cheek, but visibly rotated from one side to the other for extra emphasis.
Otherwise it’s flipping his cardy, adjusting imaginary eyeliner or breaking into ballet poses. All this on Andrew Boyce’s set: an eggshell portico with white furniture of which, like the rest of Tolin’s thinly disguised hagiography, Barbra would doubtless approve.