Queens deserve a long reign on Broadway

NEW YORK - An impossibly ripped performer named Nick Adams is actually able to act with his teeth. He sports great choppers, and you can tell just what his character is feeling by how much Adams bares them.

That's only the beginning of the wondrous curiosities that run through the start-to-finish sparkling Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the new Broadway musical that opened Sunday at the Palace. Its two-plus hours of seamless delight are likely to make the queen of the desert the season's king of Broadway.

The admired 1994 Australian film of the same name was ripe for musical morphing - it's a road-trip picture about three drag queens who set off from Sydney to travel deep into the outback where one of them will meet the little son he never knew, from a straight life he'd left behind. The movie plumbs the notion of acceptance, including accepting yourself.

Fans of the film - there are many - may balk at the show's book by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott, which closely shadows the film's plot but ditches some of its tense edginess, especially among the three queens who pilot their bus, named Priscilla, into the unknown. But I challenge the purest purist not to break into a smile - and then keep it.

Priscilla, directed by Simon Phillips, is essentially a jukebox musical with songs and snippets pulled straight from a gay disco a few decades back. A cast that pops out of nowhere in the desert sings and dances with abandon - buff guys and women who are ... really buff guys, and women who are striking real women. They accentuate the plot's feel-good part with a warmth so uncontrolled and stagecraft so extreme it defies description: There is over the top, and there is Priscilla Queen of the Desert, lots of levels higher.

Ross Coleman's choreography and the costumes of Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner - there seem to be hundreds - combine to turn dressed-up flouncing and everyday camp into a high art form. ("Color My World": a cast of giant paintbrushes. "MacArthur Park": a cast of giant cupcakes. "I Will Survive": a cast of giant, oh, who knows?) I've not seen this much exaggerated pelvic thrusting since the Troc on Arch Street operated as a strip joint, and no aviary I know can begin to match the feather count.

Priscilla has its own road-show history, from Australia to London and now to New York, where Bette Midler is among the producers, her first big Broadway backing. One of the three queens is played by Tony Sheldon, the Australian who originated the role of the older, worldly dragger, and whose portrayal meshes Lauren Bacall and Marlene Dietrich into the perfect earthy guy in ladies' wear. Another is Will Swenson, as instantly genuine in Priscilla as in his last Broadway gig, Berger in the revival of Hair. The third is the talented and toothy Adams, an Erie native who might as well wear a sign that says "endearing" across his chest, when he wears anything there.

If all this sounds beyond the pale, it's not. The showmanship in Priscilla is so sound, so right, and after seeing it, I can't imagine it any other way. Just give yourself over to its giddy theatrical turns. It is, after all, about acceptance.