This one-man (plus pianist) musical is a tour de force performance of passion, energy and sheer commitment by its writer and central performer Tanner Efinger. The show is based on the life of the trangender actress Holly Woodlawn, who died last year, a remarkable character who starred in Andy Warhol films including Trash and Women in Revolt to great acclaim, living the ‘Warhol Superstar’ lifestyle to the hard-partying, sexually-liberated full.
The fictionalised Woodlawn is Sugar “like the fairy” (Tchaikovsky’s Sugar Plum theme is heard first in a music box, then recurs throughout the score) a transgender woman living in New York in the 60s. Utterly incorrigable, she works her way up from prostitution to partying at Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ and the edge of stardom, rubbing shoulders with Yoko Ono and the coolest set of a generation. She is a huge character, brought to life with incredible vividness by Efinger’s performance, camp as Christmas and at once bitingly queeny and little-girl fey, her moods flip on a knife-edge from motormouthed anecdotes about her partying to vicious anger at the indignities of her unconventional life. She struts, she squeals, she dances, she rants, swigs vodka from the bottle, snorts coke from her dressing table and changes clothes every five minutes in a performance saturated with energy and commitment. The character Efinger has created is complex. Despite the obvious cruelty of the world she inhabits, Sugar retains a touching positivity brushing aside chronic money problems and arrests for indecency. People are “all so lovely”, her gaudy clothes “so fabulous, isn’t it, I got it at Macy’s?”, A letter from her mother (conventional but supportive, neatly sidestepping the more cliched family estrangement trope) a cause for sentimental pride as she passes her photo round the audience.
Sugar’s (almost) silent companion throughout is the show’s composer & music director Matt Winkworth. He sits at the piano, impassive, watching Sugar’s hysterical rages with a benign but slightly questioning eye, never commenting except in a brief lullaby as she sleeps. He comes in for a lot of abuse too, as Sugar takes her periodic ire out on him, ranting that she “discovered him, took him in when he was nothing”. But we wonder what reality he really inhabits, as he mutely keeps Sugar company without any apparent independent existence, pandering to her frequent demands to “play me a song - no a faster one!” the Greek chorus to the melodramatic turmoil of Sugar’s state of mind. The songs are minimal, with a whimsical air that is typical of Winkworth’s style, all broken music box switch-back changes of time signature under sweetly melodic voicings of Efinger’s ever-illuminating text. The music is timeless music theatre without a hint of the generation in which Sugar is living and I did feel that more engagement with the musical styles of the era might have contributed to a sense of place and time which is - perhaps deliberately - rather lacking.
Suzie Burlton’s set, in the little in-the-round floorspace of the King’s Head, is minimal but effective, and direction from Lizzy McBain and Emma Webb rightly trusts Efinger’s undoubted ability to carry the audience with him as he moves from apartment to nightclub, graveside or the hotel room of a client. There is occasionally slightly too much ‘running on the spot’ style rushing from imagined place to place, but the honesty of Efinger’s performance carries us easily through such moments of disbelief-suspension, never descending into farce.
With a style often akin to drag-act cabaret - reminding me also a little of Keith Waterhouse’s Soho-soak monologue Jeffrey Barnard is Unwell - the audience is kept involved at every turn, Sugar by turns confides and lectures, flirts, asks advice and, finally, shockingly, turns on us. Because this is the big finish, the punch-line of the whole show and, in some ways, the moral of the story. Abandoned by her celebrity friends - ‘Andy’ is mad at her because she was constantly drunk on his film set - Sugar is evicted and forced back into prostitution. She takes out her rage, first on Winkworth, who stoically leaves the stage with one last look of paternal sadness, and then on the audience as she berates us for our complicity in the freak-show flavour of her story, for our voyeurism, our hunger for spectacle. Tearing off her clothes and wig, standing in her naked male body in the cold glare of the theatre working lights she screams
“Isn’t THIS what you came here for? Well you’ve seen it, so now f*ck off!”.
High as Sugar - Kings Head Theatre, Upper Street - Wednesday 20 July
Tanner Efinger (writer/performer) Matt Winkworth (composer/performer) Lizzy McBain (director), Suzie Burlton (design), Emma Webb (movement director).
