Theatre review: Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist

A few days after the official follow-up to SIX, I'm off to a show with a different creative team (including some big names in its development process so far) but which has clear - perhaps way too clear - ambitions to follow in its footsteps. Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist also features a famous historical queen with a detachable head, Zizi Strallen (part of the Z-series of Strallens that also includes Zoltar, Zuzan and Zabulon) taking on the title role, and even casts original West End SIX stars Renée Lamb and Millie O'Connell, but things haven't panned out quite as well so far: The official line is that Cake's ticket sales were so bad the run got cut short before it had even had a press night, so the Sunday matinée I'd booked turned out to be the penultimate performance.

In fact the Marie Antoinette story we get isn't what we might be expecting: Unless Mrs Dodd missed out something major in our O'Level History classes on the French Revolution, the queen didn't actually go to the guillotine for her role in a diamond heist. Tasha Taylor Johnson (book, music and lyrics,) Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (book) and Jack McManus (music & Lyrics) focus on a scandal known as the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which was a PR nightmare for the royals and a useful tool in inciting revolution.

The actual central figure here is Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy (Lamb,) a key figure in the affair, who attempted to befriend the queen and use her in her scheme. Here, she succeeds in doing so after bumping into her in the ladies' loo, and the genuine friendship that results is one that leads Marie Antoinette to make a big sacrifice when the scandal is exposed. Meanwhile the real villain of the piece is the Cardinal de Rohan (Travis Ross,) a sleazy courtier whom Jeanne targets as the mark and fall-guy in her con.

Originally directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie for the West End trial runs, Bronagh Lagan and Christopher Tendai respectively adapt it for The Other Palace, and I wish all these creatives had brought a distinct personality of its own to the show. But Sami Fendall's 18th century-meets-fetishwear costumes in particular feel like a direct copy from SIX, and from that point on it's hard not to view the whole thing as a fairly shameless cash-in.

It probably would have helped if I could follow what was going on more easily, but while I have to give the show props for some very catchy, very lively pop songs - the show has very little patience with letting the characters mope off in big ballads, although Strallen and Lamb do get to show off their pipes - an old problem I haven't had to complain about much recently rears its head again, and the sound balance means I had very little clue what most of the lyrics were, and even the spoken lines weren't always easy to catch. Given the show is giving its own alternate take on a historical event that isn't even that famous in the first place, I could have certainly done with the clarity.

I'm sure that would have helped elevate the show hugely for me, as the music is good and those lines I did hear properly were often clever and witty, and there were also some sly touches in the staging - like when Strallen is shown on screen walking around the theatre's corridors, and passes a photo of Tom Francis in Sunset Blvd on the wall. But it's the similarities to one particular other show that's the problem, and if the focus had been more clearly on telling this story than on chasing another one's success, things might have worked out very differently all round.

Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist by Tasha Taylor Johnson, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Jack McManus ends today at The Other Palace.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.