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. Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.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.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.
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