In November, a new musical was announced called Gwyneth Goes Skiing. It received the kind of press coverage that most theater companies would kill and die for. Despite it being put on in London, the likes of CNN, Variety, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Deadline, and dozens of U.K. outlets besides, reported that Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous lawsuit, which followed a skiing accident that took place at Deer Valley Resort in Park City, Utah, in 2016, was getting the musical treatment. It was, at the time, big news on social media too. Of course it was. It was a charmingly stupid concept of exactly the kind that people love to imagine.
“Prepare to be gooped,” the show promised. So I decided to go along. I tried to go see it in December, but was told that that run was now being billed as a “work in progress” ahead of a proper showing that press could come to in February.
The show is performed by Linus Karp, who plays Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joseph Martin as Terry Sanderson, the Utah optometrist who sued her for supposedly skiing into him and causing him what he claimed were life-altering injuries. The music was written by Leland, who also writes songs for, among other things, RuPaul’s Drag Race Rusicals. For the uninitiated—although if you’re reading a review of a musical about Gwyneth Paltrow’s skiing lawsuit it seems unlikely to me that you have never seen Drag Race—the “Rusicals” are a now-staple episode of each season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in which the contestants perform in a newly written musical about something in culture. Previous Rusicals have included Kardashian: The Musical, Cher: the Unauthorized Rusical, and Moulin Ru: The Rusical. Gwyneth Goes Skiing also features a cameo from one of U.S. Drag Race’s biggest stars, Trixie Mattel, who appears in a prerecorded video as Paltrow’s mother, Blythe Danner, calling her daughter during the trial lunch break.
And unsurprisingly, it was very much a show for “the girls, gays, and theys,” as the performers themselves put it in addresses to the audience. My boyfriend, who is, for his sins, straight, and who didn’t know before the day of the show that Gwyneth Paltrow had even had a skiing accident, watched it nonplussed, although I freely admit that this was entirely my bad for bringing him. Because there were only two performers, all additional roles were played by people pulled up from the crowd, delivering their lines from a teleprompter, with mixed results.
It feels like a Rusical, in the good ways (catchy songs) and the bad (easy jokes). Lots of queer comedy shows of this kind play with being knowingly and appealingly half-assed. Crappy props, groan-inducing gags, shonky stagecraft. But if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to be really funny with it. And this isn’t funny enough, quite. It’s also not musical enough. The first song takes so long to arrive that I wondered if maybe I had misunderstood and that this was just a play. When it does come—a duet about the joys of skiing from Gwyneth and the deer of Deer Valley fame—it’s lip-synced. So are all of the other numbers, in a way that feels like an easy out for the performers rather than a creative decision. It is also, somehow, 1 hour and 40 minutes not including the intermission, which is wildly more runtime than the story can fill.
I don’t want to be too hard on Gwyneth Goes Skiing. Both performers are very likeable, there is some ingenious fun with Karp and Martin “skiing” on a revolving stage, and the second half did pick up significantly. This part was set during the trial itself. At the end of the proceedings, which included a musical number performed by Sanderson’s attorney (a puppet), and testimony from Paltrow’s daughter, Apple (a literal apple on a stick), the audience could vote on who was guilty via a QR code at our seats. But here, and throughout, the main delights were the lines that came almost verbatim from the trial itself, as signposted by the show with interjections like “Yes, they really did ask her that.” Can you improve on the camp drama of the true facts that Gwyneth Paltrow countersued for one American dollar, or that she said that while Sanderson claimed significant life-quality destruction as a result of his alleged injuries, she had lost “half a day’s skiing,” or that, at the close of the trial, when she won, she put her hand on Sanderson’s shoulder and said, “I wish you well”? If you can, it hasn’t been done here.
This show, at half the length, would make total sense at 11 p.m. in a hot, cramped basement full of merrily drunk people at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Indeed, this is an environment Karp and Martin know well. They’ve previously done How to Live a Jellicle Life (a show parodying Cats) and Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story (in which Princess Diana rises from the dead and tries to put the record straight about her life and take revenge on various royal family members). Both these shows ran at the Fringe. Maybe it would also have gone down easier in the two middle weeks of December, the peak of the silly season.
As it was, it felt like a format that had broken out of its rightful place and come to the attention of too global an audience. I guess that is just how the internet works now. You can, by somewhat freak circumstances, put on a pretty small-scale show in London, send out a release to the London press, and have it reported in world media later the same day in a way that makes it seem like a much larger cultural event than it was intended to be. The fact that the original December production swiftly became a “work in progress” after the show went viral may have been a result of the show’s creators becoming daunted by this outsize attention. The fact that I was even there writing about this for Slate speaks to that.
When quirky news stories break, you often see people on social media saying stuff like “I need the film/musical of this immediately.” What do people mean when they say that? Do they actually want those productions to be mounted, or do they simply mean “this is a wild story”? Sometimes such dramatizations do work. The TV adaptation of another internet-breaking scandal that took place in the U.K., the so-called WAGatha Christie trial—in which the wives and girlfriends (WAGS, to Brits) of two very famous footballers set out to take each other down—was fun. But I left this production feeling like Gwyneth Goes Skiing had been the victim of its own virality, and couldn’t deliver on all that promise. And that the idea of making a musical out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s skiing accident is funnier on paper (or in a tweet) than it is on stage.
