The titular Madison Hegarty – child and ensemble legend – literally trips the light fantastic in getting onstage. Just a stool, a head mic and her talent will entertain us for the next detailed hours, until the offstage David ruins her plans of sharing every intimate memory and feeling she’s ever possessed.

So what we get is the rough cut of the tough and tumble times of ambition and self-delusion over talent. From the most provocative 6 year old school performer to her foray into musical theatre we see, not so much the rise as the very gentle upward slope, of her career. 

As her story unfolds there are a lot of offstage voices that curtail, cut and cauterize her career in a very (for the audience) humorous way. We can see that she has little insight into her own abilities other than her need to be a star. And it’s the last unexpected-yet-‘of course!’ moment that actually pulls a nice gut punch to the audience’s relationship with her.

Madison has the pipes: each song IS beautifully sung. Her delivery of ‘Fuck You’ is great not only for the fun she has with it but for the vocal technique she effortlessly displays. Her rendition of ‘Defying Gravity’ from Wicked is given generous and well deserved applause.

During one instructional moment in the art of the stage, Madison has an audience member onstage to assist her rendition of Cats. The patron joins in but is left a little to her own devices and I think more care and comedy could be had with her.

While the offstage voices fill in various episodes of her career, and afford us the emotional insight near the end, it seems disjunctive for these voices to be bad memories – surely in a self-tribute show there may be #alternativefacts to what happened. If they are cast off in her blind way, it didn’t really come across for me. 

Her final number, ‘All That Jazz’, is a gem and the end to a good time; an enjoyable show. I would love to hear Hegarty sing again. 

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