Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Pride Performances, Roundup 3: Taylor Mac provides the definitive Pride entertainment, and Aja reinvents herself

• By drediman
• June 26, 2021
• No Comments

The latter half of this week – the lead-up to Pride weekend, the culmination of Pride Month – saw the opportunity to attend even more LGBTQ+ performances. As always, here are my ongoing thoughts.

TAYLOR MAC: EGG YOLK
Restart Stages at Lincoln Center

Last night, as part of Lincoln Center’s outdoor Restart Stages series, Taylor Mac and his longtime cohorts (whose A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2016 remains one of the top experiences of my life) invaded Damrosch Park with a show entitled Egg Yolk (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED). Garbed in an explosion of rainbow-colored wires and tubes by ingenious costume designer Machine Dazzle, the singular artist dazzled the audience with an act that was, in my book, the definitive Pride entertainment. Over the course of just an hour (the time limit for Restart Stages performances), the family onstage celebrated queer icons, eccentricity, general befuddlement – among other topics – with operatic grandeur (judy was in spectacular voice last night), the intimacy of freewheeling cabaret, and the unpredictability of performance art. The evening featured original songs and arrangements by music director Matt Ray, whose inspired compositions exhibited an astonishing range of styles that meshed into a fabulously eclectic musical collage.

AJA: CROWN
Caveat

Then down at Caveat, a subterranean venue in the Lower East Side, I attended Crown (RECOMMENDED), the new show concocted by New York drag queen Aja. Since garnering significant exposure as a feisty contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9 – as well as All Stars 3 – the outspoken drag queen has gone through tough times and has reinvented herself from the rowdy queen we all saw on television into as a more introspective, spiritual kind of performer. With the change also came a shift in her visual aesthetic, with the scrappy bubble gum glamor of before being replaced by a fashion-forward homage to her cultural heritage and newfound spirituality. The show featured a team of young, eager back-up performers, who danced up a storm as Aja lip-synced and moved to a bevy of somber new songs (mostly of the hip-hop and rap ilk) written during the pandemic. While a part of me misses the boisterous brashness of her previous iteration, I was happy to see Aja in a healthy, grounded place.