Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, pursued flamboyant cross-dressing and staged lavish theatrical productions that exhausted his family fortune and left him deeply indebted. He died at 29 owning £544,000, roughly equivalent to over £70 million today. Relatives destroyed many personal papers, yet enough material survived to reconstruct key aspects of his life. The story has been transformed into a spectacular, all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganza overflowing with glitter, camp energy and optimism. The score is full of upbeat, danceable queer anthems, while the staging mixes pantomime-style slapstick with sensitive explorations of erasure, otherness and vulnerability.
Paget was actually a queer trailblazer, at risk of fading into obscurity like so many LGBTQ+ figures from our past, until his story was resurrected by the Seiriol Davies, the creator of How To Win Against History, and brought to life as a spectacular, all-singing, all-dancing, musical extravaganza with more glitter and sequins than an auction of Elton John's old stage outfits.
Paget was infamous during his short life for his penchant for cross-dressing and staging lavish, flamboyant plays. His excesses ended up turning his family fortune into a deep well of debt. When he died at the young age of 29, he owned £544,000, equivalent to over £70 million today. Unsurprisingly, his relatives weren't too chuffed about either the debt, or the rumours of homosexuality, and his successor Charles Henry Alexander Paget went on to burn
The score, also written by Davies, is sublime, full of hilarious queer bangers that demand to be danced to, but there's not quite enough room in the crowded Edinburgh Fringe venue for that, sadly. Much of the show is a laugh-out-loud riot of humour, right from the start, as an almost pantomime-eqsue series of slapstick scenes take us through Paget's early life at Eton.
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