REVIEW: STILETTO at Charing Cross Theatre 24 March – 15 June 2025

‘The quality shows in a riotous, joyous production’ ★★★★★

Marco Boroni, just a poor boy from a poor family, has a talent, a wonderful thing, as everyone listens when he starts to sing. For Marco is a castrato in 18th century Venice and one of the few of his kind for whom fame and fortune (and a wealthy patron, and more important smitten patroness) beckon the purity of his preserved childish treble voice. 

Yet Marco himself (Jack Chambers) has a musical ear and a love-struck eye to tell him the female roles he’s trained for and craves at the city’s theatre might just be better sung, who’d a thunk it, by an actual woman, the one that he wants being Gioia (Jewelle Hutchinson), a slave girl from the wrong side of the Grand Canal. And so the pair of star-crossed lovers grab their lives, defy convention and the sneers of their superiors to get out of their gutters and reach for the heavens.

Stiletto, a new musical, comes with a high pedigree. Multiple Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy nominee Matthew Wilder wrote the music and lyrics, while the Book writer Tim Luscombe is an Olivier nominee. The quality shows in a riotous, joyous production with nary a lull for breath in its two hours of grand passions and low skullduggery. Ceci Calf’s set design, dark pillars and simple, transformable furniture is gorgeously supplemented by Anna Kelsey’s pitch-perfect costumes and lighting designer Ben Ormerod’s darks and shades. The design also hides a 10-piece orchestra back there, and allows the show to prove the point that nothing can’t be improved by a bit more cello, a brass section and a mandolin. There’s real attention to detail in the staging, too – for example, the invisible removal of a dead body and a near-perfect theatrical sleight-of-hand with some cleverly costumed actor-switching.

The quality of sound impresses too, with a series of songs that have that character of instant familiarity that suggests you’ve heard this before while still being entirely original. We’re very much in 20th/21st century musical theatre style rather than 18th century Venice for these. Marco and Gioia get their high points – Jewelle Hutchinson soaring on God-Given Gift when setting out her stall early, for example. And the ensemble pieces sound like the hits – Every Day of Your Life featuring the entire cast at opening and close. But there are standout songs in the solos for non-lead characters, with Greg Barnett (as Marco’s Svengali-like tutor, cast aside by the pupil who’s outgrown him) and Sam Barrett (as a worm who turns against his corrupt lord and master) the absolute high points in How Do I Get Through and, especially, Go Along.

The whole show, from the opening bars, is a feast for eye and ear, and, while there may be little surprise in the basic Romeo-and-Juliet-triumph-over-adversity of the plot, the songs are the thing here, and a very very good thing they are, too.

Photography: Johan Persson

STILETTO at Charing Cross Theatre 24 March – 15 June 2025

Music and Lyrics: Matthew Wilder

Book: Tim Luscombe

Director: David Gilmore

Charing Cross Theatre  24 March to 15 June 2025

Box Office: https://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.