New York City
Alaska Thunderfuck, Nick Adams, and Joey McIntyre star in this predictable new musical comedy.
Fiercer than the rivalry between Montague and Capulet is that which exists between the Fish Tank and the Cat House — two drag nightclubs on opposite sides of the street, run by former lovers who now despise each other. We learn all of this in a prologue read by Liza Minnelli, who is a producer on Drag: The Musical at New World Stages. Sure to delight fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race (the cast features several alums), it offers a giddy night off-Broadway, stuffed with feathers and sequins and not much substance.
The contending queens are Alexis Gillmore (Nick Adams, sporting the best biceps in the biz) and Kitty Galloway (Alaska Thunderfuck). Gillmore’s club, the Fish Tank, is the more popular of the two, an aquarium of exotic fish (Lagoona Bloo, Luxx Noir London, and Liisi LaFontaine — a rare AFAB queen) accessible for a reasonable cover charge.
“Extravagant spectacle, catering to the lowest common denominator,” Kitty hisses (if drag doesn’t work out, she might consider a career in theater criticism). So what if the shows at the Cat House (which star Jan Sport, Jujubee, and Nick Laughlin as a Chattanoogan bearded queen) are regularly half-empty? This is a premium product for a discriminating clientele.
Despite its popularity, the Fish Tank has sprung a leak. Alexis hasn’t paid taxes in three years and the IRS is threatening to shut it down. Kitty prepares to pounce on Alexis’s soon-to-be-homeless audience, but a new landlady for the Cat House decides to raise the rent beyond reason, imperiling that club as well. How will they get out of this mess?
You can probably guess without ever buying a ticket. Nothing about this story is groundbreaking (the book, music, and lyrics were all collaboratively written by Tomas Costanza, Justin Andrew Honard, and Ashley Gordon). A side plot involving Alexis’s accountant brother (Joey McIntyre) and his boa-curious young son scrupulously tows the “Born This Way” party line. And the budding romance between the only straight characters in the show feels like a perfunctory afterthought (something usually reserved for a gay couple in the chorus — so enjoy that reversal, I guess).
To the writers’ credit, the music escapes the generic sound of so much contemporary musical theater, embracing a pop-punk sound that will have you head-banging along in your seat. It’s an aural sugar rush (with the expected post-show crash) joyously administered by the sexiest band off-Broadway (Andrew Orbison is the music director).
The forgettable plot does at least offer a platform for memorable performances: Jujubee is so cartoonishly over-the-top, you know that in her mind she is the winner of every Rusical challenge from here to eternity. But she has some real competition in J. Elaine Marcos, who delivers a trio of scene-stealing performances as an IRS agent, a mustachioed lawyer, and the Cat House’s new landlady, Rita Laritz. Eddie Korbich is giving method as Drunk Jerry, the barfly who buzzes around both clubs with fabulous (in every sense of the word) stories of gay times gone by. I regularly witnessed him wandering aimlessly around the cabaret seating.
But the performer who most convincingly sells this material is Alaska, whose ultra-dry vocal fry proves to be the ideal instrument through which these lines should be uttered. When Rita threatens to level the club to make way for a luxury high-rise, she calmly informs her that she can’t because “that’s the plot of Burlesque.”
Director-choreographer Spencer Liff turns in a flashy, fast-paced production full of stunts that had the queens in front of me snapping their fans in approval (we know we’re in for something special when we see the fireman’s pole stage right). Featuring more levels and runways than LaGuardia, Jason Sherwood’s set is a palimpsest of counterculture, with old posters of David Bowie and T-Rex peeling from a concrete wall. Costume designer Marco Marco and makeup designer Aurora Sexton succeed in the herculean task of creating a walk-in closet’s worth of original looks that would actually receive high marks on the runway of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It all looks stunning under Adam Honoré’s lighting. And Drew Levy’s sound design mostly overcomes the challenge of delivering clear lyrics over rock percussion — not that we’re missing much from the lyrics we fail to comprehend.
Drag: The Musical isn’t going to be making any lists of the greatest musicals of all time. But as a fun night out with your girlies, it fits the bill. Have a martini at Atlas Social Club before the show and you’ll have a great time.