By Lynda Sturner****First, it’s 4th of July and you’re watching fireworks and before you know it, it’s Labor Day and the tour buses and cruise ships arrive. Most of them never stay to see our fabulous nitelife, but during the day, they walk around happy, shopping at our amazing stores and loving Ptown.
La La is a summer person. She hates to see the party ending. But it’s not over yet. Yes, the nitelife scene is winding down, but there’s still lots to see, there’s just less of it.
The magic continues with the Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, Woman’s Week, Thanksgiving, Holly Folly Weekend, a Christmas show at David Drake’s Provincetown Theater and the music doesn’t stop until after New Year’s Eve. La La will be covering it all as it occurs.
Coming up in September is the musical, Midnight at The Never Get. A sold-out hit last year, the show is back in
Ptown this year, produced by Mark Cortale at The Art House from September 6-8 at 7pm. Following that, they go to New York for an Off-Broadway run at The York Theatre. The show stars Mark Sonnenblick and Sam Bolen, with book lyrics and music by Mark Sonnenblick. It’s charming, witty, funny and poignant. Catch it in Ptown before it moves.
If you ‘re missing the downtown performance arts scene in New York, then The Afterglow Festival is for you. Now in its eighth year, the artists include Joey Arias, The Illustrious Blacks, Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Martha Graham Cracker, Enid Ellen, Ben Fishback, Ruby Rose Fox, Carol Lipnik, Anne Stott and Tammy Faye Starlite. This too, is at The Art House. The Afterglow Festival brings a new kind of energy to Ptown. The Festival runs from September 11-15.
Now, it’s time for us to look back and see what kind of Ptown season this has been.
La La thinks it was a fabulous season with an abundance of incredible shows to go to. There is such talent here, that it’s difficult to choose who to see first on any given night. I don’t know another town in this country that has this much going on excepting, of course NYC and LA.
I finally got to the see Lisa Lott at the Post Office Café Cabaret and was blown away. She does a Liza Minnelli like… like wow! She not only does Liza, she is Liza. She has her staccato energy, her dance moves, her voice and best of all, Liza’s pipes. It’s razzmatazz with 15 eleven o’clock numbers. She shows videos of Liza and usually when you see the real thing and the drag queens come back on, it’s not pretty. With Liza Lott after her Minneilli videos, she is just a continuation of those videos.
Something fun happened to me when I went to see her show. I mixed up the times and was seated for another show that was on before. The manager come back to tell me that Liza was on at 8:30 instead of 7pm. I was seated, with my two drink minimum, when I found that out. The manager invited me to stay and see both shows. Then she said, “Did you vote for Donald Trump?” La La said, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME???”
She told me Let them Eat Cake was not for Trump supporters and she always asked that of anyone buying a ticket. And was that show ever not for Trump people. Aurora Sexton does a wicked Melania Trump and it’s a Diary of A First Lady. She not only looks like Melania, she brilliantly nails Melania and the show is a dark, cutting edge political satire. You laugh a lot, but underneath is a disturbing darkness. A postcard with “Help Me” and a picture of Melania behind bars is on every seat. Part of me can’t wait for her to come back next summer and the other part wishes she doesn’t need to.
La La saw Coco Peru in The Taming of the Tension at the Pilgrim House, mainly because everyone I knew was saying,
“She’s brilliant! You must go and see her!” Were they ever right! She’s a beautiful redhead with the largest blue eyes in Ptown. Both comedian and singer, one minute you can’t stop laughing and the next you’re in tears. Her show is a journey from bullied high schooler to finally being able to stand up onstage, proud and sassy. She finds her voice and does a hilarious running bit about facial fillers. When she sings Kander and Ebb’s “Ring Them Bells,” she struts and belts out that song, jazz hands and all and you know she can bring it home with the best of them.
Speaking of bringing it home, there is Varla Jean Merman in her show, Under A Big Top. La La talked with her at Joe’s Coffee. I wanted to go right back to the beginning and wondered when and how Varla began.
Varla says, “I was in college this was like in 1989-90. I had just read Ethel Merman’s biography where she and Ernest Borgine were married for about thirty minutes. There’s a chapter in it called my marriage to Ernest Borgnine. I turned the page and it’s blank. I saw, oh my God, how much she hated him. I thought if they had a child she would have gotten rid of it and that was the story line. We made videos of me running all over New Orleans.
“There was a talent show and my friends devised this ten-minute play about Varla. When I first started, I wasn’t paying much attention to the details of the character. It wasn’t until I began filming the movie Girls Will Be Girls in 2000, when writer and director Richard Day wrote a movie about our characters. It was like so that’s what I do! That made me stay in character from then on. Varla became much more intricate at that point.”
“Back then, Varla and I were the same person. Thank God I’m not that person, or I’d be dead. And now, as you age, the character has to change. Anybody does on the journey. What is cute when you are 23 is not when you are 59. It’s still fun and wild, but it’s not so wild. It just changes the dynamic.”
“You know it’s my 20th anniversary (21st show) in Ptown. I didn’t want to do great hits because I wanted to do something different. I loved my circus show, which I did many years ago in 2002. I thought I would do the same theme, but I would write a whole new show.”
“I write with my friend, Jacque Lamarre. I write it myself and then send it to him to touch up. When you’re a writer you start to cannibalize your own jokes and your same rhythm. You even have you own rhymes to use over and over again. It’s good to have someone with other ideas, not that I use everything he says, but he inspires me.”
Like The Shining, (loosely) based on Steven Kings’s book and movie, The Whining played this summer at The Art House. Varla, Peaches Christ and David Grimm wrote it. “We just wanted to write something fun. Horror is a hard sell in Ptown. It was Peaches idea to do it. Everyone talks about Ptown being like The Shining in winter and no one’s ever done a show about it. We had no idea whether it was funny or just bizarre. It turns out, it was both. We just read it the week before we started rehearsing. You read it and you make cuts right away. The moment you hear someone else read it, it becomes a different thing. It’s so amazing that process. I did my show (Under a Big Top) from 8 to 9 and then The Whining at 9:30 on Fridays. If you’re already in drag, why not?”
The Whining runs through September 8 – Friday at 9:30pm and Saturday at 7:30pm.
