Velour: A Drag Spectacular! is doing a precarious series of splits in its premiere engagement at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. The intriguing collaboration between author, artist, and RuPaul’s Drag Race champion Sasha Velour, and Tectonic Theater Project director Moisés Kaufman (The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife) feels very much of two minds.
It’s a Vegas-slick revue and a vulnerable memoir; a broad cultural history lesson and a personal manifesto; a multi-player solo show.
With a cornucopian outpouring of poetic imagery, lip sync’d deep cuts (Aerosmith, Halsey, and Bjork are among the artists covered), and Velour’s irresistible charisma, the 100-minute production is occasionally thrilling, never less than entertaining, and always slightly shy of coherent.
Musical numbers-often paired with elegant, harness-assisted aerial choreography-are interspersed with biographical anecdotes adapted from Velour’s book, The Big Reveal.
The most touching of these involve her grandmother and mother’s gestures of supportiveness when Velour first expresses her genderfluidity as a small child and later, after a period of tramautic repression, returns to it definitively in her late teenage years. These segments are frequently accompanied with video projections, including irresistibly endearing home movies of Velour playing dress-up as a child.
A second, less successful track of anecdotes finds Velour sharing the story of a pioneering but little known early 20th Century drag performer along with sometimes too-lengthy documentary film clips.
In its efforts to charm and enlighten the audiences who buy season subscriptions to regional theater while maintaining a bit of drag’s downtown edge and experimentalism, Velour makes a well-intentioned stretch. But it frequently strains at the seams.
Playing to which crowd?
There’s a festive cheerfulness in the air from the moment one enters the Playhouse’s 450-seat Sheila and Hughes Potiker 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 attention and you’ll notice those lips pucker and those eyes well with tears: What appear to be printed designs are actually your first peek at Cosette Pin’s projection designs, which along with Diego Montoya and Ricky Reynoso’s Elsa Schiaparelli-influenced costumes, David Rockwell’s scenic design, and Amanda Zieve’s color-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 middle-aged female audience members, who appeared to slightly outnumber gay men at the opening night performance.
Not the slightest whiff of leather or poppers could be detected.
In fact, 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, references to sex and eroticism 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 pinch of raunch to be found.
This odd decoupling of drag and sexuality may make the show easier for straight first-time drag show-goers to enjoy, but to this gay man, it felt overscrubbed and a bit dismissive.
It’s not aesthetics that we’ve been fighting to have accepted.
Creative breakdown
About three-quarters through the show, it falls apart, accidentally on purpose, with a disingenuous clunk that feels beneath Velour and Kauffman.
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 literally 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 to provide an excuse for Velour to inform us that these three laborers aren’t really stagehands, but fellow drag artists, who then each perform a deliciously unhinged solo number.
Ezra Reaves, in a brat-green Elvis ensemble, 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, does 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-as well as the full cast number that 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, self-consciously nutritious cake.
Decisions to be made
The producers of Velour: A Drag Spectacular! are aiming for Broadway, but in this first incarnation, the show feels wildly scattershot.
Amidst its Moulin Rouge snazz run ribbons of sanitized agit-prop and wisps of intellectual folderol that seem either leftover from a prior draft or abandoned mid-development (Stray bits of undeveloped philosophizing about “the history of drag, presented in drag” and the revelation of “truth via disguise”).
An eye-popping tangle of great talent and good intentions, this drag show needs to pull on its big boy pants and make some hard decisions about what it wants to be when it grows up.
