PFT: l’ll Be Seeing You

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 22/9/2026

 I’ll be Seeing You

Simon Russell Beale as Liberace

Martin Sherman, author, Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti, directors

Pitlochry Festival Theatre played host to I’ll Be Seeing You, by Martin Sherman, a camp, and undeniably entertaining dip into the glittering vortex of Liberace. At its centre stands Sir Simon Russell Beale who takes to the rhinestone-encrusted camp of Las Vegas like a duck to water. Watching him revel in the ostentation, the costumes, and the sheer theatricality of the showman, one message becomes instantly, glaringly clear: someone must cast this man as Albin in La Cage Aux Folles without delay.

Yet for all Russell Beale’s magnetic winking presence, the play—written by a playwright who actually inserts himself into the final fifteen minutes, seemingly harbouring a deep-seated disdain for his own subject—suffers from a fundamental misapprehension of who Liberace actually was. It treats him largely as a drag queen in standard drag-adjacent tropes. But Liberace was not a drag queen. He was far more complex, contradictory, and culturally significant than that simple classification allows.

Liberace was a supreme master of the intimate medium of television. Long before Las Vegas mega-residencies, he understood the unique mechanics of the TV screen—winking directly into the camera, flirting with housewives, and dismantling the fourth wall to make every single viewer feel like he was performing exclusively in their living room. Something Russell Beale does with aplomb, the fourth wall is well and truly shattered. But Liberace also brought classical music to millions through sheer televised charisma, pioneering a form of intimate, parasocial celebrity that laid the groundwork for modern broadcast entertainment.

Instead of engaging with this cultural mastery, the production gets off to a clunky start with a first ten minutes that feels less like dramatic writing and more like someone reciting Liberace’s Wikipedia page verbatim. The play never reaches for heavier themes—his probable ties to organized crime and the suffocating realities of being a gay superstar from the 1950’s through the 1980’s—fails to follow through on its own setup.

The script misses a crucial historical reality: Liberace wasn’t simply in hiding. Instead, he operated under the protective umbrella of the mob that ran all the casino hotels on The Strip in Vegas, navigating a complex web of protection. In many ways, his outlandish visibility allowed him to serve as an unwitting gay icon who helped shatter the very closeted silence that kept the gay community bound to mob-controlled protection rackets of the mid-century. The Stonewall Inn in New York was run by the Genovese Italian mob family up until the riots, a racket that extorted private lives of gay men.

Equally frustrating are the glaring omissions in the biographical narrative. The play completely ignores Liberace’s well-documented appetite for rough, working-class trade. The delicious power imbalance that satisfied Liberace’s hunger is alluded to when the writer in the play finds himself undressing in front of Russell Beale. But it's done crudely, but not clearly. While Scott Thorson, the most famous of his young lovers, makes an appearance, he is relegated to the background when he deserves a far more prominent, central role in the narrative core. Even worse, the piece entirely skips James Cary—Liberace’s final lover, who famously carried on an affair with the maid while embezzling from the star—as well as Gladys Luckie, his devoted Black housekeeper, whose presence was a staple of his personal life.

And yet, despite these narrative missteps and structural flaws, the production remains persistently, delightfully funny. The staging leans heavily into absurdity to wonderful effect: a hilarious cardboard Rolls-Royce drives on and reverses straight back off, flying theatrical shell footlights evoke peak Vegas kitsch, and one particular sequence had the auditorium in stitches—two young men in skin-tight hot pants, piano keyboards painted down their spines, bending over cheek-to-cheek in front of Russell Beale so he could play their backs like a grand piano.

I’ll Be Seeing You is a mixed bag—a light, camp, frequently hilarious evening that ultimately skims the surface of a far darker and more fascinating historical figure. But for Russell Beale's joyful turn alone, it is well worth the trip.

 ‘I’ll be Seeing You’ plays at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until October 11, 2026