If there were any doubt that drag is now mainstream entertainment, then the full house for La Voix: The Red Ambition Tour at Birmingham’s 400-seat The Old Rep showed how far it has come.
The American reality TV series RuPaul’s Drag Race has done a lot to popularise drag in the 21st century, but there is a long British tradition of drag performance going back through Lily Savage and Julian Clary’s The Joan Collins Fan Club in the 1980s, Danny La Rue in the 1960s and back to Dan Leno and music hall pantomime dames in the 19th century. Britain’s Got Talent is the closest we get to a modern-day music hall and La Voix reached the semi-finals in 2014.
La Voix: The Red Ambition Tour is a cabaret show with a live four-piece band, some knock-out numbers, well-written stand-up routines and plenty of audience interaction. The real fans sat at the front of the stalls to be gently mocked, and Andy, Anita and Yvonne all got their moment on the night I saw it. It is impressively staged with a succession of glamorous frocks, a big lighting rig, complete with swivelly lights that swing out into the audience, pyrotechnics and a lot of glitter balls. The sound system was a bit over-loud with a powerful sternum-rattling bass, and at times La Voix got lost in the mix, but it all added to the sense that this is a big show squeezed into a small theatre.
La Voix is terrific. She has a proper musical theatre singing voice and her impressions of various divas were excellent. She rattled through Barbra Streisand, Cher, Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland, Madonna, Diana Ross and Tina Turner, all played as characters—she doesn’t does sing the numbers. The scripted comedy routines are sharp and clever. There is an ingenious Alexa playlist routine in the first half and the stage medium routine in the second half is a perfect mix of a tight script and improvised audience interaction. The show is properly constructed with a rousing act 1 finale, a get up and dance disco medley in the middle of the second half and what I gather is her standard encore, Bonnie Tyler’s "Total Eclipse Of The Heart", for which we all stood up and joined in.
The audience was about 75% male. La Voix acknowledged her gay male fans, but the innuendo, such as it is, is at a mild, panto, end of the pier level. La Voix has a warm, self-deprecating stage presence and she is more likely to make jokes about her bad knees than fisting a member of the Cabinet. She name checked two local gay bars, the Eden Bar and Missing, which got a big laugh of recognition from the audience, she plugged the merch and she told us how much she loves The Old Rep; it was a masterclass in how to work an audience.
The show lapsed, at times, into a ‘just play the hits’ routine. A lot of her audience has been with her since Britain’s Got Talent ten years ago and some of her material has, too. The lockdown jokes felt dated and jokes about Madonna falling down the stairs at the Brits in 2015 are well past their sell-by date. And for such a warm-hearted, generous show, I found the ‘lesbian women are ugly and boring’ trope jarred. It wasn’t funny the first time she did it and it didn’t get any funnier with repetition.
Other parts of the show, like wishing members of the audience happy birthday, were pure panto. La Voix makes an excellent pantomime dame, but you could see the ‘cruise ships in the summer, panto season in the winter’ roots showing through (the tour is sponsored by P&O Cruises). This is a good show, though; she loves her audience and they love her and she is well worth checking out on the rest of the tour.