2009 Taboo

Taboo started life as an idea from Chris Renshaw to create a musical based on the Eighties club scene, involving the story of George and Leigh Bowery and encompassing them in a musical feast of excess and glamour. Boy George, never one to shirk hard work, grasped the bull by the horns and along with an excellent creative team, created the Taboo we know and love today.

Taboo means its a time to re-examine that bizarre and extraordinary mix of new romanticism, tech-rock, euro-pop and passé punk which defined the eighties musical scene. It was a strange and exciting period of experimentation based on the clashes and conjunctions of trends in fashion, art, club-culture, sexuality, and commercial forces.

Taboo is a new musical that revisits and redefines the decade and delves deep beneath the surface. It takes its audience on a revelatory journey to the heart of a wild, unique and inspired era that spawned some unique and influential artists.

Taboo tells the story of the times, with actors playing out the parts of the bill-topping performers who defined a generation, the indefinable phenomenon that was Leigh Bowery, the one-man extravaganza Marilyn and club entrepreneur extraordinaire Philip Sallon. And then of course, there's Boy George, travelling from squat to superstardom, from rock to rock bottom. The showinterweaves some fantastical facts of the 80s with a classic love story of ambition, passion and betrayal.

Taboo is an ingeniously crafted musical take on the life, times and styles of the innovators who shaped the pop-culture fate and the face of a decade, created by one of its figureheads. It was warpaint, trannies and gloriously self indulgent sure enough. Taboo shows it was a whole lot more.