Mr G: The Musical, Chris Lilley's camp school extravaganza, would have been a great blueprint for the Royal Opera's show
All the fuss over operas about sex and drugs and silicone enhancements you may have noticed in the media recently makes me think of what the show Anna Nicole could and should have been.
No, not La Traviata or The Ring, or even Stephen Sondheim's Company, but Mr G: The Musical, the song-and-dance spectacular that caps Australian comedian Chris Lilley's mockumentary of surpassing genius, Summer Heights High. Here, in place of Anna Nicole's dearth of characterisation and musical conservatism is a show of supple originality, brilliant singability and dramatic subtlety.
What Richard Thomas and Mark-Anthony Turnage manage in two hours, Lilley does in seven minutes: the trance number ("She's a naughty girl with a bad habit/bad habit for drugs") will stick in your brain more than anything at the Royal Opera House at the moment, and the final moral ? "You don't need sex and you don't need drugs, 'cos life is ecstasy" ? distils the message of Anna Nicole into one neat pill.
On top of that, the production out-camps even Richard Jones's best efforts at Covent Garden. All together now: "The smell of life. The smell of children. The smell of doing it together..."
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