Feathers, glitter, gold lame and The Weather Girls. This is of course not what we all associate with Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, but this Maggie is a glorious wise-cracking, all-singing, all-dancing cabaret Queen. As Maggie herself said, ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’. This show is definitely more disco and harmony and will bring a wider smile to your face than the real Maggie ever did.
Give the Lady Boys a miss and go and see this instead.
We follow Maggie through the late 1980’s during the Section 28 Act, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality, through her transformation into a overnight cabaret sensation. Matt Tedford is a scarily accurate Maggie with side-kicks Hessell (Matt Milne) and Tine (Ed Yelland) providing all the other characters – Peter Tachell, Winston Churchill, Jill Knight, Maggie’s PA Whatshisname and various closeted government workers, backing dancers and nightclub extras.
Except these larger than life characters are not as we remember them. Sir Winston Churchill is a very funny talking portrait who comes out of the closet, Jill Knight a gloriously grotesque pantomime villain and Peter Tatchell – world renowned human rights campaigner -‘rude, full of crackpot socialist ideas, mentally unbalanced and yet strangely attractive’.
The show is full of energy and moves at a cracking pace with the full house soon laughing and singing along. A wardrobe malfunction almost threatened to ruin the show but is dealt with by Tedford’s many amusing off the cuff asides to the audience. He is such an exuberant performer he almost makes Maggie a sympathetic character. But this is a fictional Maggie who has become a cabaret legend and given up politics for glitter, so you can be totally forgiven for leaving smiling. Give the Lady Boys a miss and go and see this instead.
