Shooting Star

Review by Sam

⭐️

Following its off-broadway premiere, Florian Klein’s semi-auto-biographical musical about the Gay Porn industry makes its London debut with Drag Race UK alumni Divina de Campo.

Taylor is a young wannabe actor struggling to pay his rent, who finds himself becoming the next big thing in Porn after working a shift as a go-go dancer. Written by and starring Klein, the show exposes the highs and lows of the industry through a pop infused soundtrack. However, the production follows a traditional structure which lacks originality and features a score filled with unoriginal lyrics and a heavy reliance on smutty humour.

Whilst taboo topics such as pornography are challenging to write creatively about (not least a musical), Klein’s story follows a typical narrative and is littered with enough smutty humour to make the most comfortable audiences feel uncomfortable. I’m all for crude humour that pushes the boundaries of both theatre and comedy, but when there’s a severe lack of direction and imagination it makes the quantity of X rated ‘jokes’ feel unnecessary and for the most part uncomfortable.

The performances were sadly weak with the ensemble doing the best that they can with the source material. However, a combination of the venues atrocious sound system and actors struggling to hit certain notes only added to the uneasy viewing experience. The show is staged immersively, which enhanced the painful viewing and gave me whiplash from constantly turning around to witness the scenes in this drawn out narrative. The venue also has a disco ball which was used so often (once during a funeral scene…) that I was left feeling it was a character in and of itself who at times stole the limelight.

Whilst I could see potential for the story to make a good play, the production needs re-writes to make this feel worthy of a stage . There are the smallest glimmers of a well-written book at it’s core, however in its current iteration I can’t recommend this as I feel a more equipped playwright needs to take charge of fluffing up this X-rated story to make it less wooden.