CityLife

The Lady Boys of Bangkok

THE Lady Boys of Bangkok have become regular visitors to our city over the last few years and their new show is pretty much business as usual, which means fast-moving, flamboyant and fabulous fun.

The 16 male Thai entertainers whisk the audience – mostly, but by no means exclusively, female and of all ages – through a glamorous and sexy series of costume changes, songs and good-humoured fun that makes most West End musicals look positively drab by comparison.

There were some old favourites in the set – the half-man, half-woman rendition of Save Your Love, for instance, and the astonishing transformation that accompanies My Way – plus some intriguing new additions, including a genuinely impressive balancing act.

Frocks

But the core of the show remains the songs, the frocks, the sly humour of the choices (just try thinking about the implications of the Lady Boys performing Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl!), the shameless mugging and the audience-pleasing antics.

There were Kylie and Girls Aloud songs, an ABBA medley, It’s Raining Men (inevitably), and references to Ghost and Dirty Dancing alongside a “tribute to twentieth century icons” including the likes of Take That, Michael Jackson (“gone but never forgotten”) and, peculiarly, Bon Jovi.

It’s all enormously entertaining and almost impossible not to enjoy, unless you’re absurdly hard-hearted or strait-laced. If you’re at all shy, though, I’d steer clear of the first couple of rows.

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