Gay Hijinks and Lots of Good Fun in "Drag: the Musical" and "The Big Gay Jamboree"

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” is now in its 16th season and its Emmy-winning celebration of gay and trans culture has spawned a half dozen spin-offs and scores of international versions. And now its influence seems to be hitting New York theater as well. 

Or at least I suspect that its broad-reaching popularity may be one of the reasons that so many different kinds of people have embraced Oh, Mary, the nonbinary playwright Cole Escola’s unapologetically campy and totally hysterical version of Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln’s marriage, which features a barely closeted Abe and the trans actor Bianca Lee as Mary’s chaperone.  

This hasn’t usually been my kind of humor but I had a great time when I saw Oh, Mary before it moved to Broadway, where it’s extended multiple times (click here to read my review). And over the past week, I saw two new shows that turned out to be just as proudly queer, intentionally silly and almost as delightful. Drag: The Musical, which opened this week at New World Stages, is pretty much a direct descendant of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” 

The main creative force behind this goofy feel-good comedy about the rivalry between two drag clubs run by erstwhile lovers is Justin Andrew Honard, who under the drag name Alaska Thunderfuck was the runner-up on the fifth season of “Drag Race” and the winner of the second season of “Drag Race All Stars.” Honard co-wrote the musical's book, music and lyrics and Alaska stars as one of the show's club owners.  

Several other former “Drag Race” contestants also show up in the cast and even though their acting abilities vary, director and choreographer Spencer Liff makes sure that each has an opportunity to show off their special skill, be it hitting high notes or dropping into dramatic splits. 

Broadway vet Nick Adams, who’s appeared in such shows as Priscilla Queen of the Desert and La Cage aux Folles, is totally up to all he’s asked to do and is having great fun playing Alexis, the very buff owner of the rival club. And one-time New Kids on the Block member Joey McIntyre does a very nice job as Alexis’ straight brother Tom who is troubled by Alexis' drag identity (click here to read an interview with him).  

But the true heart of the show is Tom’s 11-year-old son Brendan, who has his own awakening at the club but refuses to be defined by any traditional labels. His anthem “I’m Just Brendan,” not only underscores the show's message of tolerance and acceptance but brought down the house at the performance I attended. And we should all keep an eye out for young Remi Tuckman who alternates the role with Yair Keydar and delivered the song with the polish and confidence you might expect of someone twice his age. 

The second show I saw was The Big Gay Jamboree, which is playing down at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village.  Jamboree is the brainchild of Marla Mindelle, who was one of the creators and stars of Titanique, the long-running spoof of the movie “Titanic” as filtered through the music of Céline Dion (click here to read more about her). 

This time out, Mindelle and her collaborators—Jonathan Parks-Ramage co-wrote the book and Philip Drennen co-wrote the music and lyrics—have created a kind of original story about a woman who finds herself trapped in a Golden Age Broadway musical. Like Dorothy in Oz, she gathers a trio of also-unhappy inhabitants who try to get back to the real world. 

The show ends up being a cross between the first season of AppleTV’s “Schmigadoon!” and a Forbidden Broadway for millennials. Only a lot raunchier than either. 

Titanique’s success has apparently made it possible for Jamboree to enjoy a bigger budget and it’s spent the money wisely. There are countless costumes changes, many of them laugh-out-loud funny in their own right. Keep an out eye out for the dancing zucchinis.

Meanwhile, the set by the trendy design collective dots makes smart use of both old-fashioned flats and up-to-date video projections. Their set also includes sly refences to the turntable in Les Misérables and the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera. But again, it’s the performances that make the show.

Mindelle is a go-for-broke comedienne and has such an impressive belt that it’s surprising she isn’t already a bigger star. But the entire cast, under the nimble direction of Connor Gallagher, is terrific.  

A special shoutout goes to Paris Nix, who plays Mindelle’s character's love interest and has one of the best baritones I’ve heard in a long time. He delivers a showstopping anti-gospel number that almost justifies the cliché of a Black performer doing a gospel number. And cheers also to “Saturday Night Live” vet Alex Moffat for being a game villain, even though he’s under used. 

It’s unlikely that either of these two shows will make it to Broadway, although I said the same thing about Oh, Mary.  And sitting in the front row at the performance I attended of Drag: The Musical was the Tony-winning producer Tom Kirdahy. So who knows? 

An Insanely Busy Fall Season for Broadway & Me—and For Other Theater Fanatics Too

This October has turned out to be a crazy time for those of us trying to keep up with all the fall show openings. I’m currently scheduled to see more than a dozen of them over just the next two weeks. I’ll only be able to write about a few of them here but I will be chiming in with my thoughts on most of the others on the Broadway & Me Quickies site I started at the beginning of this season and which I hope you’ll check out by clicking here.

I’ve been keeping busy in other ways too. Time Out NY magazine’s Adam Feldman, the New Yorker’s Helen Shaw and I once again joined our pal Patrick Pacheco on his TV show “Theater: All the Moving Parts” to talk about the entire season (you can see that by clicking here).  

And today marks the release of the latest episode of “All the Drama,” my BroadwayRadio podcast about the plays and musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This episode focuses on the 1977 winner The Shadow Box and features an interview with its playwright Michael Christofer. I hope you’ll give it a listen too, which you can do by clicking here.

The Splendors of "The Hills of California"

It kind of makes sense that so many people are drawing comparisons betweenThe Hills of California, the new Jez Butterworth play that opened this week at the Broadhurst Theatre; and Gypsy, the classic Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical that will open later this year at the Majestic Theatre with Audra McDonald. Afterall, both are about mothers who have show business dreams for their daughters that end in unanticipated places. 

But Veronica Webb, the mom in Butterworth’s play, doesn’t remind me of Gypsy’s Mama Rose who was trying to live her dreams through her children. Veronica reminds me more of my own single mother who wanted her girls—my sister Joanne and me—to have an easier life than she did and who hid her ambitions for us behind a sometimes tough facade and who also sometimes made difficult—and not always wise—choices to achieve those goals for us.

Butterworth gets at all of that in this beautiful play about the fickleness of dreams and the ineffable bonds that bind mothers, daughters and sisters to one another. When the play opens the adult Webb sisters are gathering in their childhood home, a down-on-its heels hotel in the seaside town of Blackpool, England, because their mother is dying from a painful stomach cancer. 

But as they keep their death watch, the story flashes back to a time 20 years earlier when it seemed that Veronica’s efforts to turn her four girls into a successful singing act like The Andrews Sisters might actually come true. Instead, she assents to a compromise that will haunt all five of them for the next two decades.  

That decision turns the second-born and least talented of the sisters Gloria into a shrew who browbeats her husband (nearly all the men are feckless in the world of Veronica and her girls) and who flares up at the least provocation. Middle sister Ruby professes to have made peace with the ho-hum way her life has turned out but is prone to panic attacks that leave her literally struggling to breathe. And Jill, the baby of the family, hardly has a life at all, never having left home, still a virgin and, by default, the caretaker for their mother as she aged and fell ill. 

Only the eldest Joan, the most beautiful, most talented and most rebellious of the four, seems to have made it. She fled to the U.S. 20 years earlier to pursue a music career and separated herself from the family so completely that her siblings aren’t sure she’ll return even though she’s been told that their mother is on her death bed and holding on in the hope of seeing Joan one last time.  

Butterworth specializes in big shows. And like his previous award-winning plays Jerusalem and The Ferryman, this one runs for close to three hours and boasts a cast of nearly two dozen characters. Some of the actors double in the alternating time periods but the roles of the Webb girls are played by separate quartets of actors. Under the nimble direction of Sam Mendes, they’re all fantastic (even if it may take Americans ears a little time to adjust to their Yorkshire accents) and the young actresses playing the sisters as teenagers are particularly winning when they break into several swing-era songs all deftly performed in close harmony.

But the roles of the mother Veronica, who is never seen in the scenes set in 1977, and her grown-up daughter Joan were written to be played by the same person. Butterworth created this challenge for his real-life partner the Olivier Award-winning actress Laura Donnelly (click here to read more about her).   

Donnelly is excellent in both roles. Her Veronica is a pencil-skirted martinet bristling with both determination and desperation and so focused on her goal that it's quite believable that she wouldn't have noticed that the world around her has changed and the music along with it. She has no idea who Elvis Presley is.  

But Donnelly is just as good as the late-arriving Joan, a hippie dressed like Penny Lane, the groupie in the movie "Almost Famous," speaking with an acquired American accent and—here’s where the doubling really pays off—even more of a survivor than her mother was, brooking no illusions about what life has to offer her.

Despite its size—even designer Rob Howell’s revolving set, beautifully lit by Natasha Chivers, is majestic, dominated by a large staircase that ascends to the hotel’s unseen rooms and seemingly beyond—The Hills of California is an intimate play. It doesn’t have the kind of wallop of an ending that made Jerusalem or Ferryman so memorable and that may disappoint some viewers. Even Butterworth seems to have been uneasy with it because the last act has been substantially rewritten since the show was done on the West End earlier this year (click here to read more about that).  

I didn’t see the show in London and so I can’t compare the endings. But I can say that once again Butterworth has moved me. It was so gratifying to see so many women onstage with so much to do (even if the sole Black character was a servant in both eras) and it was reassuring when, in four-part harmony, the adult sisters finally sing together, tacitly acknowledging that there is a way to forgive the mistakes of the past, even those committed by misguided mothers who were doing the best they knew how to do back then.