Fact: Mega star Barbra Streisand wrote a book called My Passion For Design.
Fact: It features the basement of the barn next to her Malibu mansion, containing a shopping mall stocked with Barbra memorabilia and keepsakes.
Fiction: all the rest of Jonathan Tolin’s hilariously camp play Buyer and Cellar. Out-of-work gay actor Alex is hired by B’s terrifying housekeeper Sharon to dust, manage and generally look after the shops – who only ever have one customer – the great diva herself.
It’s a deliciously funny idea and ex-Eastenders star Aaron Sidwell gives us Alex full on , dry bitchy asides, light-as-a feather campery and quite a lot of pathos too. As a bonus we get both sides of his conversations with the other unseen characters- the aforesaid dragon Sharon, stooping and gravel-voiced; Barry, Alex’s vicious queen of a largely failed screenwriter boyfriend ; La Streisand herself , beautifully sketched in with rolling eyes, face and hand movements and a carefully pitched drawl; and finally the man in her life actor James Brolin.
On the face of it, it’s a truly bizarre, not always sympathetic 100-minute picture of one of the world’s biggest stars, who has it all and craves more. When Alex asks her to describe Utopia she says “ being pretty “ . She wallows sometimes in her self-indulgence about her squalid Brooklyn childhood . But this heart-rending take is seen through by Barry, who’s clearly not a paid-up fan.
Her first entrance to her own Bee’s Dolls Shop is bizarre in the extreme as she masquerades as Sadie, an ordinary customer with a limited budget. What Sidwell does magically is the interplay between them, peppered with asides to us . You kinda know it will all end in tears, though their unequally balanced apparent friendship is touching.
It’s a warm tale of retail and emotional therapy that director Andrew Beckett exploits to the full, pushing Aaron’s joyful physicality and sharp tongue.
Ultoimately though it’s a sad story of someone with everything wanting more and finding life purely as an acting game.
If like me you tick all the gay boxes of loving Judy, Liza and Barbra and if you know the ins and outs of the storylines of Prince of Tides, Yentl and the Mirror. Has Two Faces, then you’ll be in seventh heaven.
Even if you don’t, you can laugh as if you did because as Barbra would say in the end we are all “ people who need people”.
Buyer and Cellar is at Above The Stage Theatre, Vauxhall till 8 November. It’s a great fun evening.
Footnote on safety: Above The Stag has immaculate safety precautions in place , with table service and at seat drinks, distancing, mask wearing and hand sanitiser. It gets a full 10 points for that on my theatre virometer.
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