WEST END BOYS
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I USED TO GO TO THE

Theatre Royal in Newcastle on Saturday mati­nees. You could go in for on and-six or something and sit at the top of the theatre. I just got to like musicals. It was very much at the end of the era - with The Sound of Music being such a success­ful film. And also, my moth­er's father, we always used to go round to his house when we were kids. He had this little council house and he had a huge stereo player. The biggest stereo I ever saw

- a stereo gram, of course, in those days. And he always had, as "the ultimate stereo recording", the soundtrack to Oklahoma or South Pacific. I grew up liking these musi­cals. And then I used to go and see touring productions of My Fair Lady or Oliver or Camelot at The Theatre Royal in Newcastle.

The first thing I ever want­ed to do was write musicals. When I was nine years old, I wrote a musical with a girl at school called The Girl Who Pulled Tails. Cat's tails. We just sort of made songs up in our heads and sang them.

It's the mixture. It's the way people burst into song

that adds something that gives the show an incredible emo­tional content - it does something that a play doesn't. It has an extra layer of involvement. When a character feels incredibly strongly, he or she just bursts into song.

We were thinking of doing an EP of various songs from musi­cals. Which ones? Climb Every Mountain. Climb Every Mountain's a beautiful song, you know? Elton John suggested that we do Dream The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha.

Of course, there's many different ways of using music in a show. Modern musicals have almost been embarrassed about the fact that there's music. Andrew Lloyd Webber felt you had to have a musical that was sung all the way through, so it

became like Jesus Christ Superstar - a kind of opera. I don't really think that works at all. When you go and see Carousel or something like that now, the songs are great and the audi­ence recognises the convention.

I've always wanted to go and see a musical in recent years where the music was contem­porary - not the kind of music you get in musi­cals. Sunset Boulevard has got the kind of music you get in musi­cals. Obviously, people like Stephen Stoneham have tried to progress the whole thing as a kind of art form. I would rather do it as a kind of popular music form and do something that's about contem­porary life, with con­temporary music.

Theatre and pop music, over the years, have become com­pletely divorced. So you  can  take  a Broadway choir and put it on a record, 'cause it's never been done before. But, in the Fifties  and  Sixties, musicals were really the main source of pop

music and songs. George Gershwin and Cole Porter wrote for the theatre and then the songs were played on the radio and became hits.

But I always tend to love the artifice of pop music anyway. I tend to like it when it's got a bit of glamour, an artificiality. Which doesn't mean it isn't making a serious or real point. I think it's more powerful when it's got that. I found U2 more powerful when Bonn was doing Mephisto than when he was doing some Southern preacher on their earlier albums. And I think, at the same time, people say our music has "a theatri­cal quality". Whatever that means - it's a bit camp or some­thing.

Closer To Heaven, we call it "a play with music". I find the idea of doing it quite thrilling, because it is something I've wanted to do all my life. And it's a huge challenge to try and do something like that it’s set in a lind of nightclub culture part of the theme is gay, it's not the entire thing. And it's

Funny, as well. It's a sad comedy. Though, with Jonathan Harvey, it's very funny. And some of the songs are funny. I think we can write for different characters, which you've got to do in a musical.

And also I think our music sounds exhilarating in the theatre. And that's what I always like most

About music - when it's exhilarating.

BETWEEN HELL AND HIGH CAMP

OH, COME ON. IT WASN'T THAT   Drum and Bass style, or put on an irony-free BAD. Reading the reviews for   version of Springtime For Hitler. "Closer Te Closer To Heaven, you'd think   Heaven?" sniffed The Independent, before dither’s updated Bernadette in a    playing a dazzling wordplay not seen since DIUIII

Dorothy Parker's demise; "I'd say it was clos­er to purgatory." The Independent was far from alone. Elsewhere, Closer To Heaven was judged to be: "Closer to hell, actually" (The Daily Mai~, "Closer to closure" (The Daily Telegraph) and

snore! - "Closer to hell" (The Mail On Sunday). At least The Daily Express showed a little originality. But even they had to baldly ask, "What have we done to deserve this?"

Much of this bad press was pretty pre­dictable. What did you expect a bunch of creaky old theatre critics to make of a show like this? Half-naked bum boys! Youngsters tak­ing drugs! Modern dance music! And, worst of

all, here were two pop star upstarts muscling in on the hallowed environs of the West End theatre - a land where, lest we forget, Andrew Lloyd Webber is king. Oh, please!

Actually, Pet Shop Boys were perfectly suit­ed to writing a West End musical. Neil loves the form. They've previously deftly covered songs by Brecht and Weill and Stephen Sondheim. And Neil points out that he often writes in char­acter, anyway - most obviously when writing songs for Liza, Dusty, Tina, Patsy and Kylie. Pet Shop Boys' live shows have been highly the--artic collaborations with Derek Jarman, Peter Docherty and Sam Taylor Wood - their last

London concerts were even held at The Savoy Theatre. And they're almost certainly the only pop group to have name-checked the Von Trapp family in a song. Pet Shop Boys could have called their first musical Inevitably.

Strangely though, a "Pet Shop Boys musi­cal" was someone else's idea. A BBC bigwig suggested Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe work on a TV musical with Jonathan Harvey back in 1994, after Jonathan borrowed the title West End Girls for his first TV play. That project was eventually abandoned, but only because all three felt that they wanted to do it properly, in the theatre.

Tennant, Lowe and Harvey began working on Closer To Heaven in earnest in 1997, rent­ing a house in Sussex for 12 months, where they met for week4ong brainstorming sessions. True to form, Neil says he studied other musi­cals closely - watching The Sound ofMusic on video over and over again, trying to figure out how the whole thing worked. "At the end of each song, people have changed," he says, "or the situation has changed. By the end of My Favourite Things, for instance, the governess is the pal of the kids. Before, they all hate her. And they do that in four minutes. And, if you look at every song, that is the case."

Originally considered for a run at the National Theatre, Closer To Heaven has ended up being produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Really Useful Group. This may appear incongruous - Neil had often said Webber's work sums up all that's wrong with the mod­ern musical - but Really Useful Group's Tris Penna is an old friend of the boys and ran their record label, Parlophone, for many years.

The musical's basic storyline came from Jonathan Harvey. Rather brilliantly, it manages to revisit all of the grand themes that run through Pet Shop Boys songs: a sexually con­fused young man runs away to London, he finds himself through club culture, two young men fall in love - uneasily - but then death comes calling, bringing the "endless party" to an end. "The gay element of the show is about trans­formation," Neil Tennant says, "about growing up and realising what you want to be. That's a very musical subject." Neil's being slightly disingenuous here. The play is set in a gay club

- supposedly modelled on Kinky Gerlinky -and, as far as I could make out, there's only one straight character. And, even she, as the world's worst gag puts it, "isn't gay, but her boyfriend is." Oh, and so's her dad. For most reviewers, Closer To Heaven committed what appears to

be a cardinal sin these days - that of being "too gay". Hence The Guardian's dismissal of it as a "campy farrago". Or The Daily Express con­cluding that it was "stuck up its own ghetto". Freud would have had a field day with that line.

It was instructive that the two real rave reviews came from people who had some famil­iarity with the world in which Closer To Heaven is set. The Evening Standard's highly influential

- and out - theatre critic, Nicholas de Jongh, declared that "A little theatre history was made last night when the first truly gay musical to be written and composed by Englishmen reached the West End... Closer To Heaven brings a rush of excitement and daring to London's musical theatre." Boy George, who, in one of the numer­ous (Philip Treacy) hats he wears these days, is a columnist on The Sunday Express, praised it to the very heavens. "Closer To Heaven is Joe Orton in slingbacks mixed with a hint of Margarita Pracatan whizzing round a council estate on rollerskates," George gushed, albeit a little bafflingly, before concluding that it was "a breath of fresh air for the theatre".

Neil Tennant would have been very pleased with these last two reviews. Not because they gushed about Closer To Heaven. But because they actually understood Closer it. Part of the ~

point of putting on the play was to try and get some pert young bums on the­atre seats for a change. "We're trying to do a contemporary play with contem­porary music," Neil says, "quite true to the reality of clubbing, which people who don't normally go to the theatre can relate to." Unfortunately, many people who do normally go to the theatre clear­ly con 't relate to it.

Closer To Heaven has a clear queer theatrical antecedent, but it's not Joe Orton. It's Noel Coward, whose 1924 play The Vortex similarly scandalised and repelled theatre critics with its then groundbreaking subject matter: "deca­dent" bright young things and refusing-to-grow-old-things, drinking cocktails, taking drugs, having fun and having high­ly unconventional relationships. Though some were appalled at seeing such "human sewage" stinking up the stage, others praised Coward for bringing the theatre kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Remind you of any­thing?

Closer To Heaven is certainly highly flawed. Jonathan Harvey hasn't pulled off the kind of bawdy comedy he did so well in Gimme, Gimme, Gimme – the script is littered with some howling~ unfunny gags. And the blossoming boy meets-boy romance that he described s(touchingly in Beautiful Thing here fails t( convince - thus, when one of the young~ lovers dies, it's hard not to think "Sc what?" When reviewers claimed that Closer To Heaven veers between the "coarse" and the "sentimental", as almost all of them did, they had a point. Having a character die of a drugs overdose is unbelievably tiresome (though there's a rumour doing the rounds that Chris Lowe had argued this should be removed from the script). Typically, for a Pet Shop Boys production, it looks stunning; the chore­ography's dazzling, the sets spectacular.

And the music? It's the bloody Pet Shop Boys, sweetie! Most successful pop derived musicals are little more than a cavalcade of an act's greatest hits (Buddy, Mamma Mia!, All You Need Is Love). Pet Shop Boys could have easily gone down this road - as I said, the script has similar subject-matter to many of their songs - but Closer To Heaven fea­tures all new material (though Shameless appeared as the b-side to Go West, and three songs, In Denial, Vampires and the title track, were previewed on their last

album, Nightlife). Rather pleasingly, these 18 songs sound more Pet Shop Boys than they have in a good few years. Although the play's dramatic climax is dampened by being followed by the glib and awk­ward Positive Role Model, you do get two of the most beautiful things they've ever written: For All of Us and Friendly Fire ("About me, the critics lied, I ignored them and survived indeed).

Perhaps Pet Shop Boys' fatal mistake was to call the damned thing Closer To Heaven. If they'd called it Closer to Hell maybe lazy reviewers would have quipped "Not a bit! Closer To Hell is actu­ally closer to heaven". Maybe Pet Shop Boys should have called it Closer To Old Compton Street - which, technically speaking, The Arts Theatre actually is. As for the whole thing being "closer to hell", well, if that's the case, as AC/DC's Bon Scott once so sagely squealed, then hell aren’t a bad place to be

· Closer To Heaven is at The Arts