Midnight at the Palace Review – Radical Joy Lost in the Wreckage

★★★

Midnight at the Palace sets out to capture the anarchic, glitter-soaked chaos of San Francisco’s legendary drag troupe The Cockettes, and while it often teeters on the edge of collapse, there is still plenty to admire in its ambition.

The show is inspired by the psychedelic, free-loving counterculture collective that took 1969 San Francisco by storm, founded by Hibiscus (George Harris), later immortalised for placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s gun during a Vietnam protest. The Cockettes helped pave the way for icons from David Bowie to RuPaul, and Midnight at the Palace promises a dazzling, genre-defying musical tribute to their rise and their crash-and-burn Broadway debut.

What we get instead is a production that embraces disorder a little too literally. Fabulous but scrappy costumes, underbaked performances, and a muddled sense of direction leave the show feeling more like a late-night student cabaret than a slick piece of musical theatre. Characters drift in and out with little depth, and even Hibiscus, who should be the beating heart of the piece, feels underdeveloped and spends much of the show off stage. Despite the strong foundations of Rae Binstock’s clever book, the execution does not always land.

Yet there are glimmers of brilliance. Baylie Carson delivers a tender number about home that shows what the score by Brandon James Gwinn can achieve when given clarity and focus. The company clearly revel in their roles, trying to whip up the same spirit of radical joy in the audience, and there is an undeniable electricity to the chaos when it clicks.

The intention is bold, to immerse us in the infamous Midnight at the Palace cinema performance that defined Cockette history, but the delivery never quite matches the ambition. Instead of the sharp, witty, celebratory portrait this story deserves, we get a fascinating but flawed tribute that gestures at queer resilience without fully capturing its power.

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Show - Midnight at The Palace

Venue - Gilded Balloon Patter House

Dates - Until 24th August

Times - 2130

Tickets available at https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/midnight-at-the-palace