From cabaret to Broadway, music and musicals have always been very queer, whether highlighting a fleeting moment of growing sexual and gender equality, frankly representing the reality of queer existence, or in their infamous popularity among members of the community. ‘A Night of Queer Music’ celebrated this legacy in two evenings of performances, by drawing out the queer resonances of various well known songs across different genres.
After a brief introduction by its director, Adrienne Knight, the second night opened out onto the bright Holywell Music Room with a captivating rendition of Sondheim’s ‘Being Alive’. The audience had been promised a rejuvenation of anthems from Les Mis’s ‘On My Own’ to Tangled’s ‘I See the Light’: from the minute the first three vocalists began, I knew we were really in for something special.
The tone was set excellently by the opening song, but the audience were left little time to mull over its wistful undertones. We switched rapidly to Lois Heslop’s performance of Carmen’s ‘Habanera’; an impressive reminder that the evening would bounce across genre, embracing queerness wherever it might be found. Thankfully, while this included moments of angst, the cast were not afraid to highlight the humour (as in Eliza Hogermeer and Geena Morris’s ‘Light My Candle’) in queering these songs too.
Uniting these performances was the live band. Noah Wild bound together all of the vocalists through his consistent and masterful accompaniment on the piano, occasionally joined by the guitarists (Skye Levett, Felix Clayton McClure, and Matthew Arakcheeva) and Elizabeth Tuck on the violin. These excellent instrumentals and the stunning vocals of the cast made for an entrancing combination throughout the evening, the starkness of the music room only underscoring the talent of everyone involved.
Particular standouts from the first act (although all the performers were excellent) included Katie Kirkpatrick’s ‘I Can Hear the Bells’, from Hairspray, and Geena Morris’s ‘Maria’, both of which – through switching the pronouns or the gender of their vocalist – celebrated the heady beginnings of teenage romance. Tom Campbell’s take on ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ was rich and warming, adding a welcome note of jazz as the evening drew on. We ended the act with a gender-swapped cover of ‘Heaven’s Light/Hellfire’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the themes of loneliness, hope, and shame enhanced by their explicitly Sapphic framing. Heslop’s ‘righteous nun’ Frollo agonised over her decidedly un-straight obsession with Esmerelda, dramatically and skilfully capping off the first 10 songs with her jealous angst.
The performance then broke for an interval of 15 minutes before returning for the second act, which (despite the high bar of the first set) was not to disappoint. Act 2 was headed by a skilful and entertaining version of the ‘Phantom of the Opera’, in which Morris’s phantom demanded ever greater vocal feats from Heslop. Marcus O’Connor and Tom Campbell’s sweet duet ‘You Matter to Me’ from Waitress drew similar applause, closing emotionally with the two holding hands in a moment of mutual affirmation. Both would follow this up with successful solos: O’Connor adopting the role of Eliza in a moving cover of Hamilton’s ‘Burn’ (paper-tearing included), and Campbell crooning Cole Porter’s ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ while he played the piano. Favourites like ‘Suddenly Seymour’ and ‘I See the Light’ filled out the rest of the act and were also both well received.
The evening’s songs were interspersed with three original arrangements of Sappho’s poetry by Knight, who accompanied cast members on the piano while they sang the fragments. Inserted seamlessly into both acts, Knight’s arrangements blurred the lines between ancient lyric and modern song, calling up timeless images of queer love.
My personal favourite was the final act of the evening: ‘For You Know How’, which drew all of the cast members onto stage for the last time. Together, they asked the audience to ‘go, go and remember me’. A fitting request for the last song of the show, this was one that took on ever greater meaning within the current climate of hurt and hostility in Oxford. In its explicit hope to ‘stand in solidarity’ and provide a safe space for trans people, the celebration of queerness in the show was particularly moving in the face of the growing politicisation of and discrimination against the most vulnerable in our community.
Fluidly switching pronouns and the gender of cast members, ‘A Night of Queer Music’ proudly normalised queer experiences from across ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, connecting songs from Opera, Jazz, and various musicals in a carefully curated display. With the variety of experiences it consequently touched on, the show deftly acknowledged the reality of emotional turmoil while gently insisting upon queer joy.