Good luck creating festive cheer on the same working day your exhibit – like each individual present at this location – has been Covid-cancelled until the new calendar year. But if which is a bittersweet backdrop to Le Gateau Chocolat and Jonny Woo’s low-priced-and-cheerful tunes-from-the-displays cabaret, the duo refuse to surrender to it. With this abide by-up to 2018’s A Night at the Musicals, the so-referred to as “ebony and ivory of drag” deliver precisely what enthusiasts would desire for: high camp, affectionate mail-ups, OTT costumes and flashes of flesh – all underpinned, like the sturdy foundations to a garish constructing, by Le Gateau’s resonant bass-baritone, nonetheless rumbling someplace in your guts when you are midway house.

Which is partly down to above-amplification: no matter whether sung, spoken or pretend-squabbled, the demonstrate is often aggressively strident on the mic. The most effective times are the most sensitive – Le Gateau’s fragile just take on Whitney Houston, say, ahead of that number devolves into a stompalong. Missing (by his own admission) his partner’s musical skills, Woo materials a few lip-synch figures, multi-roling amusingly to At the Conclude of the Day from Les Mis, and accomplishing a striptease to Sondheim and Jule Styne’s Some People. This is extremely considerably the form of display that expects – and receives – whoops of applause when a skimpy outfit is lose and a skimpier one revealed.

“Lower your anticipations,” we’re instructed at the start off – and absolutely sure more than enough, the demonstrate does nothing at all far more than it suggests on the tin. But it does that with infectious enjoyment, and a heightened sense from Le Gateau and Woo of their personal ridiculousness. The second is treasured when the previous struts on phase, swaddled much more like a furball than a feline, to croon from Lloyd Webber’s Cats – when Woo contributes a droll cameo, midway through Le Gateau’s Very little Mermaid selection, as a rubber-headed shark. By the finish, it’s far more singalong than present, as the pair get requests, deploy a Sound of Music medley when dressed as matching Marias, and finish with a crowd-pleaser from Grease. Our present wintertime of discontent feels…