What kind of weird holiday show is this? That was my initial reaction – not my usual reaction to a show by Taylor Mac, which is more often: Wow ( to Hir, and A 24 Decade History of Popular Music certainly, with more mixed feelings about The Fre, and Gary A Sequel to Titus Andronicus).
More photos at NewYorkTheater.Me
But Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce Pandemic! begins with the star looking like a tropical fruit monster – Carmen Miranda gone insane – or as Mac had told costume designer Machine Dazzle and make-up artist Anastasia Durasova, “make it look like a public-access show on LSD.”
And a public access show is, frankly, what it sounds like initially, with Mac just sitting there, prattling on for more than ten minutes, telling us, for example, that the parental advisory was unnecessary, then adding “there will probably be a naked butt (and) a non-binary breast or two” – and a minute or so later, launching into the first of many blunt references to sexual acts. Mac also riffs on how the holiday season and COVID-19 have much in common: “if you catch either one of them, it gives you no taste,” which is itself a tasteless remark.
It was only well into Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce Pandemic! that I understood something essential about the 70-minute video, and warmed to it.
Mac had been mentioning somebody named Mother Flawless Sabrina. I wasn’t sure whether she was a real person or an invented character until we were told that the show we’re watching is the first virtual version of a stage show that began in 2017, two weeks after Mother Flawless Sabrina’s death at age 78. She was “my drag mother,” who had invited Mac as a new and lonely New Yorker to her fabulous Christmas party. “She survived the AIDS and the self-hatred and all of that stuff.” (There is an old, restored documentary called “The Queen” about her 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest currently available on Netflix.)
So when she died, Mac thought: “I don’t want to make a holiday show. I want to make a show that celebrates Mother Flawless Sabrina disguised as a holiday show.”
That’s the key; I went back and watched the show from the beginning (an advantage of its being on demand, through January 2nd.) I saw that the show is not just a celebration of Flawless Sabrina, but of all queer people and misfits, people who feel left out of the holidays.
That helps explain why, even though there are some straightforward festive and holiday songs – performed by powerhouses Steffanie Christi’an and Thornetta Davis – Mac deconstructs “O, Holy” while singing it (“That word holy, it sticks in my craw….”); and why there is a mock panel discussion with a bearded, tiara-ed Baby Jesus (sidhe degreene) and Sexual Consent Santa (Glenn Marla); a performance by “International Boylesque star” James “Tigger!” Ferguson; and a segment of Machine Dazzle as a Christmas tree.
It more directly explains “Christmas with Grandma,” written and performed by Mac, a grim song about ugly, presumably true childhood experiences during the holidays, heard as a soundtrack to a colorful childlike animation by Dana Lyn.
One of the final segments in the show presents a series of videos of 18 “queens” from around the world being crowned – “queen” used broadly, and with affection, to signify elders worthy of respect.
“Her whole goal was to champion artistic expression as a form of civics,” Mac says of Flawless Sabrina.
Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce Pandemic! seems to have the same goal.
In its use of snark and camp and raunch and bleak reality, in an apparent campaign to deny the false cheer of the holidays, it is also insisting that the holidays belong to everybody. Doesn’t that sound like holiday spirit?
Holiday Sauce… Pandemic! is online through January 2, 2021
Tickets begin at $10.
Ends January 2, 2021
Tickets and details
Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce Pandemic! . Conceived and Performed by Taylor Mac . Music Director / Arranger – Matt Ray . Set and Costume Design – Machine Dazzle . Production Director – Jeremy Lydic . Make Up Design – Anastasia Durasova . Director of Staged Version- Niegel Smith . Creative and Executive Producers – Pomegranate Arts . Producers – Linda Brumbach & Alisa E. Regas . General Manager- Rachel Katwan .
Featuring appearances by: Machine Dazzle as MissTree, the incomparable Steffanie Christi’an, Detroit’s Queen of the Blues Thornetta Davis, International Boylesque star James “Tigger! ” Ferguson as the Angel Gabriel and the God of Sleep
With: Glenn Marla as Sexual Consent Santa, Dusty Childers as Mrs. Claus, Timothy White Eagle and Sister Rosemary Chicken as the Wise People, Travis Santell Rowland and Romeo Jay Jacinto as the Elves, and sidhe degreene as a pagan baby j.
Accompanied by The Holiday Sauce Band: Matt Ray with Bernice “Boom Boom” Brooks, Colin Brooks, Viva DeConcini, Antoine Drye, Greg Glassman, J. Walter Hawkes, Marika Hughes, Dana Lyn, and Gary Wang
Reviewed by Jonathan Mandell
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