Bianca Del Rio’s Dead Inside at the Mahalia Jackson Theater
Bianca Del Rio recently brought her Dead Inside Comedy Tour to the Mahalia Jackson Theater. It was boring, unfunny, tedious, uninspired, slow-moving, and witty as a rock. I have no idea why so many people paid their hard-earned money to see such schlock.
Bianca Del Rio and Sherry Vine
(It’s well known that Ms. Del Rio is allergic to compliments so, having read that, I’m sure she’s cackling with glee and shan’t bother to read any further. So now we can talk frankly amongst ourselves.)
Bianca, “The Queen Cunt Herself”, came on stage to deafening applause, her guns a-blazing. Referring to her tour’s most recent stop, “If you are looking for crystal meth, go to Oklahoma City.”
After a few digs at other RuPaul’s Drag Race alums, she quipped, “My hemorrhoid is more entertaining than Canada’s Drag Race.”
Of course, what makes Bianca so endearing is that as much as she puts down others, she readily skewers herself as well. When she wearily asked “How much longer can I do this at 19 years of age?”, she knew that we knew she hasn’t seen 19 since several presidents ago. She also informed us that “When I was born, I was circumcised and spayed at the same time.”
Dressed in a chartreuse green outfit and sporting Lucy Ricardo red hair, Bianca aimed lots of vicious but loving barbs at Niki, a cancer patient who was at the show courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. If Bianca joked that Niki might not make it till the end of the show, she informed her that “the only thing worse than cancer, Niki, is me.” By the end, Bianca called Niki up on stage to a huge ovation and they walked off together arms around each other.
Alas, even if I were to reprint Bianca’s canny observations here verbatim (and usually she’s spitting them out so fast, it’s a challenge to get the well-crafted lines down accurately), the words make up only part of the success of Bianca’s act. It’s her raging indignant attitude that elevates a statement responding to current non-binaryness like “In my day , we had faggots and dykes; one made flower arrangements, the other changed your oil,” to heights of emotion worthy of a Greek drama.
What I especially adored about Bianca was that not only did she rightly go after Ron DeSantis and other politicians who attack drag queens, but she went after the drag queens as well noting that they do story hours at libraries “cause they don’t have an audience anywhere else.” That’s wicked. And wonderful.
Beautifully paced with non-stop laughter, Bianca started out seemingly hyper-caffeinated (a Facebook post noted her pre-show snacks were beignets and Hubig’s pies), but after a while slowed things down a bit, and seemed to truly enjoy being back in her home town, making local references to Good Friends Bar, Tony Chachere’s seasonings, and former Oz hostess Persana Shoulders.
After an hour of brilliance, Bianca took questions from the audience, responding to them with her sharp and quick wit. A young man, Hayden, asked her to send a message to his mother to not do crazy things. Bianca had him join her on stage and wanted him to do an intro for her. He kept flubbing it until she instructed him to “use your Grindr voice.”
When Hayden, whom we and Bianca had almost given up on, came up with just the right purring tone, Bianca cracked up with bona fide delight. Beneath that wicked witch exterior truly is a mensch.
(clockwise from left) Bianca Del Rio facing the crowd; with Hayden; with Niki
If there are any criticisms to be had with the show, it wasn’t that Bianca made jokes about Jews; as a member of the tribe, I’d be insulted if she didn’t have something to say about us. “Cheap Jew” jokes, though, have been around since Noah and his Ark; with everything going on in the world today, I expect Bianca to come up with something fresher.
And the show jumped around a lot from school shootings to Beyonce’s new C&W career with no real unifying theme despite its title; Bianca even admitted as much drolly noting “that was some segue.” Those are minor quibbles, however; Bianca Del Rio is a major comedy talent, one of the best working in this crazy world of ours.
Fellow drag performer Sherry Vine opened the show with her parodies of well-known songs. Hairspray’s Good Morning Baltimore became Good Morning I’m a Whore, while Sherry transformed Dolly’s Jolene into Hole Clean for good dirty fun. Vine is an entertaining pro. Not quite at the level of Bianca, but who else is?
[To find out more about Bianca Del Rio’s Dead Inside Comedy Tour, go to https://www.thebiancadelrio.com/dead-inside-tour]
Broadway@NOCCA presents Claybourne Elder
Broadway@NOCCA recently returned after a 4 year hiatus. As the Jerry Herman song goes, it’s so nice to have it back where it belongs.
Claybourne Elder, who stars in HBO’s The Gilded Age as John Adams, kicked the series off again. He really is an elder (Elder Elder) as he’s from Utah and comes from a Mormon family–his grandfather had 12 wives and. 25 kids by the time he was 25.
Elder performed his cabaret show in which he told of first crushes (on a boy in church, of course); doing re-enactments of movie musicals with his older gay brother (when they did Meet Me in St. Louis, the brother got to be Judy Garland while Elder was everyone else); working with Patti Lupone in the recent Broadway revival of Company (no dirt, just that they share a birthday); and a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale of a random person who gave him $200 to see the Patti Lupone/Michael Cerveris Sweeney Todd which changed his life…and how he reconnected with that man many years later to discover the weird connections they had.
Claybourne Elder and Rodney Bush
Accompanied by the excellent Rodney Bush at the piano, Elder sang a variety of songs from a bluesy I Wanna Dance With Somebody to My Fair Lady’s On the Street Where You Live (which he turned into a stalker’s plea), with a special emphasis on Sondheim whom he has a special affinity for. While enjoyable, there was a consistent raspiness to his voice; I kept expecting him to explain it (a cold or whatever) but he never did. And while he’s an engaging presence and cute as can be, his tales about his husband and kids were just a little too heteronormative for me.
I hope and expect that Broadway@NOCCA will return with more shows next season. And, if we’re very lucky, the irrepressible Seth Rudetsky will be back again as well.
