Sugar

The amazing Tomáš Kantor here plays a madly ambitious young cabaret performer – charming, witty, engaging and quite, quite gorgeous.  They are developing their own cabaret show but they do need some financial help.  So, they are quite prepared to be or become whatever works. 

A poster for Pretty Woman is prominent on Bethany J Fellows’ clever, allusive, pink ‘n’ pretty set, and Julia Roberts is a sort of role model, shining ideal and inspiration for Sugar – both as star and as hooker makes good. 

After unsuccessfully trying on a variety of aggressively, explicitly sexual online personas, ‘Tom’ becomes ‘Sugar’ – awfully sweet and submissively girlie.  Identity is a fluid thing after all.  It’s whatever comes out of those floral suitcases on stage.  Indeed, identity is underlying theme of this show and we should never forget (even if Sugar does) that ‘Sugar’ is an act, a performance, a creation.

Sugar meets Richard – a gruff, tall Daddy from out of town, fifty-nine, a tech company CEO, used to getting what he wants, and awesomely rich.  Sugar revels in unknown luxury and what they take to be adoration.  The sex is fab-u-lous!  (And very funny too.)  Richard just might become more than a means to an end… Can it be too good to be true? 

Ro Bright’s text is witty and concise, maintaining a fine ambivalence between fantasy and reality, irony and emotion, cynicism and pathos.  There are snatches of appropriately inserted pop songs – excellently, sincerely and ironically performed by a wide-eyed Sugar - from such as Lady Gaga (the show begins with ‘Bad Romance’), Sugarbabes (‘Overload’), and Macklemore for the climactic ‘Thrift Shop’ – a homage and a sort of re-enactment of the famous Rodeo Drive scene from Pretty Woman. 

Perhaps the tale that Sugar tells us – as a story per se – is an old tale, a little predictable, and here running out of puff maybe two-thirds of the way through, but it is enlivened and carried by Kantor’s telling in their multi-talented performance. 

They are at once a superb actor, here popping in and out of character, creating other characters for us – Richard and Sugar’s two wiser friends, some nasty snob shop assistants - confiding in us, inviting (if not quite getting) our sympathy, singing and, yes, playing keyboard, baby grand and cello, and being very pretty in a twink kind of way.

The show is billed as cabaret, but it’s not quite – it’s a monologue play with songs.  Kantor’s cabaret touches – like his ‘crowd work’ where he interacts directly with the audience, function more as interruptions than as integrated parts of the entertainment.  Director Kitan Petrovski maintains a kind of relentless rhythm with little variation in pace or tone so that we might experience all this as a kind of assault.

Nevertheless, Kantor’s performance and the kind of persona Sugar represents sweeps the audience along with them – laughing at the ironies, entranced, sharing the uncertainties, the shifting malleable identities and the emotions of a naïve and credulous rent boy.   And under the jokes and the vivid characterisations, pathos is never far away.

The show, initiated at the Fringe in 2024 and then going on to success at Edinburgh, has an undeniable resilience and pull.  See it to revel in an awesome chameleon but very refined performance.

Michael Brindley    

Photographer: Mark Gambino