Our lips are unsealed. RuPaul’s Drag Race mainstay Peppermint will be the first trans performer ever to headline a Broadway show, Head Over Heels — based on the Go-Go’s music.

The New York stage scene is abuzz as Miss Peppermint will be making history in the musical, which is to be produced by . . . wait for it: Gwyneth Paltrow.

Details at the moment are somewhat sketchy beyond that, but what we do know is that beyond “Our Lips Are Sealed,” “We Got the Beat,” and “Vacation,” the show will be fleshed out by a heaping helping of solo hits from former Go-Go’s lead singer, Belinda Carlisle. Among the key tracks: “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” and of course, her first big blockbuster as a solo artist, “Mad About You.”

Press materials reveal that the show is an “Elizabethan love story turned on its head, and will find Miss Peppermint in some very fine company, with Jeremy Kushnier (Paramour), Jeremy Kushnier (Paramour) Rachel York (of Disaster!), Jeremy Kushnier (a Cirque Du Soleil alumnus), Alexandra Socha (from Spring Awakening) and Ricardo Zayas (late of Hamilton). Additionally, the show will feature Taylor Iman Jones (Groundhog Day), Bonnie Milligan (who toured the country in Kinky Boots), and Lion King alumnus Tom Alan Robbins.

Fleshing out the ensemble are Sharon Catherine Brown, Yurel Echezarreta, Lisa Finegold, Brian Flores, Ari Groover, Tanya Haglund, Arica Jackson, Gregory Liles, Gavin Lodge, Samantha Pollino, Justin Prescott, Tanner Ray Wilson, and Ricardo Zayas.

In terms of the plot (always tough stuff, especially when the lure is that it’s a revue of hummable hit songs), Head Over Heels offers an updated take on Arcadia, a weighty tome of 16th century prose by the Elizabethan English poet Sir Philip Sidney. Arcadia has been described as “an unwieldy, sprawling treatise on sex, politics, violence, soporifics, mobs and cross-dressing,” which seems very much in the wheelhouse of one Miss Peppermint.

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music theater

Last modified: February 14, 2019