Take a Bowery: The art and life of Leigh Bowery

The late Leigh Bowery has been in the news lately, with the Broadway premiere of Boy George’s 80s tribute musical Taboo and a major retrospective of his art programmed for the 2004 Sydney Festival. The exhibition Take A Bowery: The Art And (Larger Than) Life Of Leigh Bowery opens on 19 December at the Museum Of Contemporary Art, a show which sounds a lot like an exhibition scheduled for the 2002 Mardi Gras festival but sadly cancelled. Theatre critic Ben Brantley gave a stridently mixed review to the Americanised version of Taboo, but praised (Boy) George O’Dowd’s portrayal of Mr Bowery. When he’s singing (though not, alas, when he’s talking), Brantley wrote, he generates that mixed magnetic charge of attraction and repulsion that is what the show is presumably meant to be about. Yeowch.