“Shantay You Stay!” Those words, your would have to say, are no longer just for a niche audience. Ru Paul’s Drag Race, the US TV hit is now touring across the globe with Australia added to the itinerary as contestants bring out the claws and the glamour live on stage.
Hosted by series judge Michelle Visage, the show includes an all-star cast of past winners, finalists and fan favourites from each season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, including Adore Delano, Alaska Thunderf*ck, Detox, Ivy Winters, Jinkx Monsoon, Manila Luzon, Sharon Needles and winner of Season 7 Violet Chachki.
Ru Paul’s Drag Race Battle of the Seasons begins its Australian tour in July. We caught up with one of its stars, Jinkx Monsoon (Jerick Hoffer), just prior to the start of the tour.
So how did Hoffer first become attracted to drag?
I went to see this show at age fourteen, they* tell us, and I remember the moment when this drag queen was performing on stage, and she pointed at me specifically in the crowd. I remember feeling this electricity surge through me, and it was as if she had just given me the curse! I think drag queens are a bit like werewolves: you meet one who introduces you to the secret life of drag, and weeks later you become one yourself.
Hoffer graduated summa cum laude from their theatrical performance degree at Cornish College in Seattle. But drag per se was not always where they were headed.
I was actually majoring in musical theatre. All throughout my education, on my breaks, I would go back to drag to make money. But then I started finding ways to incorporate drag into the work I was doing in school. My teachers started to embrace that too, allowing me to play female roles in projects, encouraging me to explore, not just the comedic side of drag, but the more dramatic and profound aspects of it. Funnily enough, although I majored in musical theatre, most of my work for the first two years after I graduated, was in classical theatre. When those offers started to dry up, I went back to drag and built up a name for myself as a drag performer. Then when I began to get offers of acting work again, people were wanting me to play female roles. So drag really helped me keep my career going, when most actors might have been in a lull.
Drag has certainly come a long way since the 70s and 80s, when drag queens were more homogenous in look at style. Today, these are fully-developed characters with back stories. So how did Jinkx come along?
Jinkx is actually based on my own mother. I’ve taught acting workshops, not just for drag, but for plays where they are doing cross-gender casting. And I always start by getting students to do an impression of their mom. You can work out a lot of what draws you to playing the feminine gender by exploring what you loved about your mom: what were the things that made you laugh, or made you excited, about the women in your own life? So there’s a lot of my own mother in Jinkx, but also a lot of antiquated influences from the 20s, 30s and 40s, such as Lucille Ball. Many people call me ‘the queen of yesteryear’ because I am pretty much fascinated with every generation but my own!
This rampant nostalgie is evident in Hoffer’s other project “The Vaudevillians”, a 20s-style duo they have with Richard Andriessen.
The Vaudevillians was a project of mine way before Drag Race. But after Drag Race we gained a cult following. So the last four years I’ve been back and forth between work as Jinkx and residencies with The Vaudevillians. In fact we’re about to take the act to the Dublin Fringe Festival.
But before that, Hoffer is bringing Jinkx to us in Australia, as part of the Ru Pauls Drag Race Battle of the Seasons tour. What can we expect from that?
I like to refer to it as drag vaudeville, explains Hoffer. And that’s not just because I’m obsessed with vaudeville! It’s a highly produced, highly curated show, compared to what you would see at drag bars. It’s being put up in rock venues for a reason: because we bring a huge amount of production value to the show, that we’re not able to bring to our solo performances at drag bars. It’s not just a collection of these queens doing solo acts. For instance, I do Broadway musical numbers with back-up dancers, and I try to make it like something you would see at the Tonys. Then we’ve got Violet Chachki and Bendelacreme who both do burlesque, but very, very different styles. Sharon Needles brings some punk rock to the show, and Katya brings non sequitur humour that her fans have come to expect.
For anyone who has never seen drag, and who is a little nervous of venturing to a standard drag show, this will be the place to start.
The girls begin the Australian leg of their world tour on July 1st in Melbourne, and play Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide on July 7th. Tickets are selling out fast, so jump in quick to see the best of the best in drag. Tickets available here.
*Jinkx prefers the use of the gender-neutral/plural pronoun, and we have respected that wish throughout this interview.
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