"The Theatre" (1993)

[listen]

The lush, the gorgeous, the triumphant, the overdone "The Theatre" bursts with ideas and glory: musical, gestural, production, theatrical (no pun intended, at least not by me). It's fully glamorous and it's also a song about rich people stepping carefully over poor people. It's a high point of the album, though nearly too garish, too weird, too full of itself. It bears a well of molten anger that is deeply buried. It's melancholy, bittersweet—bitter. It's a Dickensian street scene in a theater district nearing show time, lighted wonders of the city after dark, I imagine the St. Petersburg theaters in winter. "The Theatre" sweeps in majestically with a whole battery of sound effects, a crying soul singer, laughing clowns and wheeling harlequins, a puffed-up keyboard-augmented orchestra. Somewhere you can hear the jugglers and the clowns when they all do tricks. It's like the late scenes in The Elephant Man, swirling into the magical other-world of the theater and its transports. But the other world of which the Pet Shop Boys sing appears to turn. It is seen from the view of the "bums you step over ... While you pretend not to notice / All the years we've been here." That is, the song notices not only the glowing electric displays of the theater marquees but also "Loan shark windows / Upon the pavement / Where you wave goodbye." (Or that's the way I hear it. The internet tells me it's "Below shop windows.") The scene is 19th century and Dickensian in its main strokes (though also 20th century and modern), with homeless teenagers lurking in the theater district, hoping for a little more porridge and/or tagging up the walls with graffiti, but more generally ignored at large. One production detail that always sticks with me is the way Sylvia Mason-James is submerged in the mix. She's singing her guts out in best Tina Turner fashion but is entirely subsumed under Neil Tennant's lead vocal and merely coequal to the sections with keyboards and orchestra, part of a three-ring circus providing atmosphere for the main show. At this point in the album, "The Theatre" is just another gaudy pleasure passing by, though one of the grandest floats of them all. Big song. Very big song.