The Rundown
While drag’s best gather to claim the title on RuPaul’s latest incarnation, Drag Race Global All Stars, Sasha Velour is doing a precarious series of splits in the premiere of Velour: A Drag Spectacular at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse. The intriguing collaboration between drag champion, author, artist, and Tectonic Theater Project director Moisés Kaufman (The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife) feels like two minds.
Since winning season nine, Velour has continued to evolve, creating a vivid and unique style of performance art. The drag multi-hyphenate, who recently stepped into the demanding high heels of Max’s We’re Here, returns to the stage with a show mindful of its roots but with an eye of the future.
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In its efforts to charm and enlighten regional theater season subscribers while maintaining a bit of drag’s downtown edge and experimentalism, Velour: A Drag Spectacular makes a well-intentioned stretch. But it frequently strains at the seams.
No Tea, No Shade
There’s a festive cheerfulness in the air from the moment one enters the theater, where a cluster of mirror balls hangs from the ceiling, decades of dance music from Chic to Madonna plays at high volume, and a gorgeously draped curtain decorated with Velour’s own Pucci-palette drawings of glossy lips and long-lashed eyes frames the stage. (The polymathic Velour, née Alexander Steinberg, is a talented illustrator whose work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker).
Pay close attention, and you’ll notice those lips pucker and those eyes well with tears: What appear to be printed designs are actually a first peek at Cosette Pin’s dynamic video projections. These, along with Diego Montoya and Ricky Reynoso’s Elsa Schiaparelli-influenced costumes, David Rockwell’s scenic design, and Amanda Zieve’s saturated lighting, give the show a visual richness that’s never quite matched by its emotional and intellectual efforts.
The chic Cirque du Soleil vibe is clearly intended to feel welcoming to mainstream audience members, who appeared to slightly outnumber the queers at the opening night performance.
Not the slightest whiff of leather or poppers could be detected.
While the utter naturalness of genderfluidity is a persistent theme of the biographical family anecdotes Velour interweaves with her knife-edge elegant dance and aerial routines, erotic references are almost entirely absent from the show.
Velour mentions a boyfriend in a fleeting moment, and there’s a single anodyne blowjob joke, but the words “gay” and “homosexual” go unspoken, and there’s not a risqué pinch to be felt.
This odd decoupling of drag and sexuality may make the show easier for straight first-time drag show-goers to swallow, but to this gay man, it felt over-scrubbed.
Let’s Have a Moment
The show falls apart about three-quarters through with a disingenuous clunk that feels beneath its creators.
From the opening number, in which Velour descends to the stage, body entwined in a Brobdingnagian pink feather boa, to a glorious routine in which her billowing white dress fills the stage, the production makes stunning use of flying harness apparatus.
But suddenly, bright light floods the stage, and jumpsuit-clad “stagehands” walk on, announcing that the rig has had a mechanical failure, leaving Velour dangling in mid-air and snapping at her underlings with uncharacteristic condescension.
This blatantly phony kerfuffle serves little purpose other than providing an excuse for Velour to inform us that these three laborers aren’t stagehands but fellow drag artists, who each perform a deliciously unhinged solo number.
In a brat-green Elvis ensemble, Ezra Reaves does an uproarious gospel spoof as their drag character, Oliver Garden. Bearded Black queen Amber St. James, cartwheels and deathdrops with abandon in a fabulous flared tangerine get-up. And sapphire-pastied Moscato Sky delivers a sizzling, silk-waving burlesque routine.
Throughout this trio of routines — especially when St. James suddenly leaps, legs akimbo, and lands crotch first between the stage and the front row — (the full cast number follows with Velour joining her fellow performers) there’s a sense of spontaneity, rebelliousness, and anything-could-happen excitement.
It’s as if an honest-to-goodness, down-and-dirty drag show has jumped out of an elegantly decorated cake.
The Last Word
In a recent interview with Pink News, Velour said, “It really helps people, a drag transformation gives you a boost of confidence, a sense of possibility, feelings of your own beauty that are sometimes revolutionary for people.”
While Velour: A Drag Spectacular strikes a chord, this first incarnation with potential Broadway aspirations feels wildly scattershot.
Amid its Moulin Rouge sparkle run threads of material that feel either leftover from a prior draft or abandoned mid-development. An eye-popping tangle of great talent and good intentions, this drag show may need a makeover to make some hard decisions about what it wants to be.
Velour: A Drag Spectacular plays at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse through September 15.
