Holidays a Drag? Every Year, Thanks to Jinkx and DeLa.
nytimes.comIt was half past 3 the day after the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting, and a pair of America’s most famous drag queens strode up to the spruce’s formidable footprint, chatting about abundance. “I don’t like being inundated with anything,” Jinkx Monsoon announced as holiday music jingled loudly nearby. “She has this conversation about Christianity,” BenDeLaCreme started to explain, before Jinkx resumed her gripe: “Christianity, the Kardashians and ‘Star Wars,’” she chimed back in. “All things that I have never asked to know about, but I know everything about.” The reason for their visit, however, was indeed the season.
For the fifth year, the duo — both alums of the TV competition “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — are presenting a live Christmas show filled with dancing candy canes, glittery gowns and songs about trauma. (In 2020, Covid forced them off the road, so they made a movie.) What began in small standing-room-only clubs has grown into a 30-city theater tour that kicked off mid-November in Glasgow and wraps in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Dec.
30. The day after the queens’ stroll, on Dec. 1, their show hit Kings Theater in Brooklyn, a former movie palace that seats 3,000. “I’ve been around for a while,” said Murray Hill, a fixture on downtown drag, burlesque and cabaret stages who’s done his own delightfully queer Christmas show for around 25 years. “I can’t believe in my lifetime that I went to go see two drag queens at a huge theater like that in New York.
It’s progress!” The latest iteration of “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” is its most ambitious yet: an hour and a half of gags that lean naughty and inspirational messages that make it nice.
