Actress Frances Barber cosies up to Neil Tennant on the opening night of Closer To Heaven in 2001
© REX
“It was a musical in which the two main guys did a line of coke and then shagged in the gents toilet of a nightclub,” chortles playwright Jonathan Harvey. “It was never going to be The Sound Of Music, or on at the London Palladium!”
Maybe so, but when Harvey teamed up with Pet Shop Boys to write Closer To Heaven, they created a ground-breaking show that successfully bridged the gap between contemporary pop and traditional musical theatre, paving the way for many of the jukebox musicals that dominated the West End in the 2000s.