Miss Hope Springs

Batting dusty-dark eyelids and swatting at a peroxide beehive big enough to house a whole swarm, Ty Jeffries’s drag queen creation Miss Hope Springs buzzes with talent. Seated at the piano, she parodies and plays out a whole soulful repertoire of the music of love, heartbreak, making it in the big city, and heartbreak again.

Her sob story is littered with one-liners: “I wrote songs for all the greats...they never sang any of them.” In revenge, she doesn’t perform a single cover all show, regaling her audience with jazz standards all of her own. Her story sets off from her small town armed only with a few fabulous outfits, on a picaresque trail through lounge jazz’s twentieth-century heartlands.

Standout song 'Girl in a Million' picks up the story – seamed through with the subtext that Springs knows she’s anything but.  She literally outgrows her role as a Vegas showgirl to become a callgirl who’s taught to play the piano by Ray Charles. Screwed over by her agent, she marries her (presumably plastic) surgeon and falls for a string of men who swing the other way. Heartbroken, she dives into the sleazy clubs of Pigalle in an excuse for plenty of breathy Edith Piaf naughtiness.

But although Springs makes plentiful allusions to entertaining sailors and winning over reluctant agents, she only dips a satin clad toe into the gutter, never wallows in it. Instead, this is a deliciously old-fashioned kind of drag, underpinned with serious songwriting skills that don’t need sequins to mask their outlines. 

 

http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/miss-hope-springs/the-boards-edinburgh-playhouse/