Amazon is getting  crazy; in a week, in the Uk shop there are just 3 copies left of the book My Passion for Design by former Broadway star Barbra (please is Barb-ra without the middle A) Streisand. And it’s all Michael Urie fault. Because Buyer and Cellar it’s so great and funny you can’t go over it.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Barbra Streisand has her own private shopping mall in the basement of her mansion in Malibu. There, there are hundreds of amazing stuff she has accumulated over the years organized in different shops: dolls, dresses from her stage appearances, sweets, candies, an ice-cream machine, a pop-corn machine,… From here, New York playwright Jonathan Tolins wrote an amazing 100 minutes long theatrical fiction monologue which imagines what it would be like to be employed to tend this surreal under-world and to have the opportunity to become friend with the owner.

Michael Urie (best know as the PA Mark in the American tv series Ugly Betty) is outstanding, not only as Alex Moore (the new employer who feels the “almost erotic pleasure of not giving this woman what she wanted” when they pretend to be costumer and seller in the Dolls Shop or as her personal coach with few notes from You’ll Never Get Away From Me from Gypsy; but also in his personal Barbra‘s caricature mode made of full lips, eye-lids drooping and tossing back imagined hair.

An amazing tour – de – force of acting but also a deep analysis about the isolation of fame.

“Are you gay? You should be 10% of the population; but apparently not in my life, there are at least 70%”

Until 2 May at Menier Chocolate Factory, London