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Priscilla through the looking-glass
Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20531940-16947,00.html
Priscilla through the looking-glass
Frocked up and bad-mouthed, the stars of a new musical draw on the long tradition of drag shows, writes Matthew Westwood
October 06, 2006
FOR a man to tape his genitals between his legs, apply lipstick and get up on stage takes a certain resolve. Not that one needs a special occasion, of course. There is no shortage of men in this country who enjoy dressing in women’s clothing, or of those who enjoy watching them, as the popularity of The Footy Show attests.But the nation may be girding its loins for a fresh outbreak of cross-dressing and a fascination with drag queens as the musical version of the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert opens in Sydney this weekend.
The metamorphosis that takes place when a man paints his nails, pulls on a wig and rouges his cheeks has preoccupied performers in the musical in the weeks leading to opening night. Actor Tony Sheldon, last seen wearing a sequined dress in The Producers, takes the role of Bernadette, the transsexual played in the film by British actor Terence Stamp. One afternoon this week during a technical rehearsal, he is found sitting in his dressing-room in a sleeveless blouse, his forearms waxed and his nails painted fuchsia.
“I’m actually living with these every day,” he says, extending his fingers. It’s too time-consuming to apply his nail polish before every performance, so he has been leaving it on. “And that becomes an exercise in keeping them concealed. Just reading the paper on the bus, you see people looking at you very disapprovingly.”
Sheldon has been applying stage make-up for more than 30 years in the theatre. But the maquillage required to transform a masculine face into something approximating the feminine is something else.
“It’s basically about changing the shape of your face entirely,” he explains. “I’m lucky, I’ve got good cheekbones, apparently, so this helps me. But it’s all about sculpting upwards with the eyes, which doesn’t seem to be a natural thing. It takes me an hour and a half to do this, to change the shape of my face around my eyes.”
The male performers in the show – and they are in the majority in this cross-dressing extravaganza – have had body waxes and, Sheldon says, can sometimes be heard exchanging make-up tips in the wings. Two of the company, Trevor Ashley and Damien Ross, have other lives as working drag queens and have been a font of knowledge for newcomers to the act.
Verisimilitude can be taken only so far, however. Sheldon draws the line at the “full drag-queen tuck”: the bodily adjustment, sometimes aided with gaffer tape, that keeps men’s anatomical bumps concealed.
“I tried it once and I couldn’t function,” he says. “Every time I sat down I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head. I’ve just tried to pad it away a bit.”
Stephan Elliott’s movie Priscilla was released in 1994, when gay Australia was prominent in the popular media. The annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade reached a peak during these years and it was televised, taking images such as dykes on bikes, leather men and drag queens into living rooms country wide. The homosexual community was showing that it had not only survived but was thriving, despite the trauma that AIDS had wrought.
Not that men in dresses were anything new. Barry Humphries, Grahame Bond and Reg Livermore – as Edna Everage, Aunty Jack and Betty Blokk – may not have regarded their alter egos as drag queens but their gender-bending personas were familiar to a wide audience.
In Sydney in the 1960s and ’70s, drag was flourishing as a nightclub entertainment, at venues such as Les Girls in Kings Cross, the Purple Onion in Kensington and Capriccio’s in Darlinghurst. Ross Coleman, the choreographer for the Priscilla musical, did choreography at Capriccio’s and says the venue was renowned for its lavish revues.
“I took Sammy Davis Jr twice to see Capriccio’s in Oxford Street; Debbie Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, Peter Allen, Robert Morley …” Coleman recalls. “They would fly into Sydney and go straight to Cap’s, because the shows were so high class … I never thought Americans attacked drag with quite the same finesse that we do in Australia. We seem to have an obsession with it.”
To an outsider, drag shows may seem puerile entertainments. Costumes and make-up – fabulously inventive and garish – are often the stars of the show, in which drag queens lip-sync to popular songs and bad-mouth their audience. It’s karaoke in false eyelashes. The better drag queens, however, create vivid personalities and introduce a satirical edge to their acts. Their stage names, too, are wicked and implausible: monikers such as Claire de Lune, Portia Turbo and Joyce Maynge.
Graeme Browning, also known as Mitzi Macintosh, presents the Priscilla drag show at the Imperial Hotel in Sydney’s Erskineville, the pub that was featured in the movie. The show was a tourist magnet for years after the movie was released, and when management took it off, “Saturdays just died”, Browning says.
It has recently been reinstated and now Browning – who makes all the costumes for his shows and compiles the soundtracks – wonders how he will compete with the $6million stage musical down the road.
“To be a drag queen, you have to be a one-man band,” he says without irony.
Mitzi is one of 10 performers profiled in a survey of Sydney drag by Carol Langley called Beneath the Sequined Surface. Individual performers can resist categorisation, but Langley identifies three main groups. The classic drag queen, she says, harks back to an earlier age of glamour and Shirley Bassey songs. “New millennium drag” is the name given to the younger generation of gender illusionists, for whom accurate female impersonation is an article of faith. Finally, Langley identifies contra-drag, or anti-drag: a more satirical mode of transvestism that parodies the gay scene and its superficiality.
Exhibit A in this last category is Vanessa Wagner, also known as Tobin Saunders. Vanessa emerged out of the alternative club scene and rose to prominence through appearances on Big Brother and a television commercial for a chocolate bar (“Must be the nuts” was the selling point).
These days Saunders takes Vanessa on the road for safe-sex education projects, especially for young people.
Vanessa’s halter-neck tops, abundant gold jewellery and hairy chest aim to offend any number of sensibilities. She’s an exemplar of the pre-feminist hostess-housewife, a puncturer of gay pretensions, more jester than diva.
“She is so left-field, so anti-glam,” Saunders says. “Vanessa really goes for that out-there, slightly clowny look. It’s bringing colour and joy to people’s lives when we are living in a pretty beige corporate world.”
Drag artists frequently refer to the mask their character gives them, a disguise that loosens inhibitions and bolsters confidence. But what’s with the dress and make-up? Why must social satire come in women’s clothing?
Sheldon, who has lived on the periphery of the drag scene for years, says it is the process of transformation that is so compelling.
“Everybody wants to be beautiful,” he says, sitting before the mirror in his backstage dressing-room. “And there is something about putting on the make-up and seeing a different face in the mirror that bears no resemblance to who you are.
“If the bonus is that you look exceptional, it gives you confidence.”
If there is something narcissistic about all this, heed the tale of Todd McKenney. Sheldon recalls a young McKenney, in drag, in a production of La Cage aux Folles.
“He missed an entrance on opening night,” Sheldon says. “He was so busy looking at himself in the mirror, thinking how beautiful he was.”
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