Actor, writer, comedian, and consistently hilarious gay wit Alec Mapa (as seen on Ugly Betty, Frasier, and RuPaul’s Drag Race) is returning to West 42nd Street’s legendary Laurie Beechman Theatre with the debut of his solo performance Ha! Penis! It’s a fitting setting for the show’s world premiere, with the Beechman (currently scheduled to shutter […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Laurels from countless luminaries began pouring in this summer, after word came down that Laurie Beechman Theatre (407 W. 42nd St.) would close for good come the end of August. Thankfully, the legendary downstairs performance space got a reprieve through October, as has the ground-level West Bank Cafe that sits above […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | With only 12 episodes in the rearview mirror, Season 3 of The Sherry Vine Variety Show (airing now on OUTtv) finds its titular star with plenty of genre tropes left to explore in the profane manner one might expect from the drag queen who turned Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah into How I […]
“Drag, whether we like it or not, is inherently political, and our presence alone, before we even open our mouths to sing, is a threat to some people. Thankfully, the unholy blend of music and outrageous antics while addressing injustice, ignorance, and bigotry almost always wins over an audience and has powered us through these […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Comedy great Kevin McDonald earned that apt description decades ago, for his work with The Kids in the Hall—the 5-man, 80s/90s Canadian sketch troupe literally unearthed by Amazon Prime last year for an all-new, 8-episode run. A well-deserved second season continues to elude, but McDonald gathers no moss waiting for it. […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Legendary, leggy, lewd drag queen Lady Bunny has returned to her NYC home base, after being a sell-out at Australia’s Sydney Comedy Festival. No, wait, we mean selling out—as in, every available ticket was gobbled up. Now that she’s back in town, word on the street (or perhaps more accurately, the […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Take the studied mimicry of a musical tribute act, add the dead-on burns of a Friar’s Club Roast, and top it off with the showy vocal flourishes of a Kennedy Center Honors cover, performed as the iconic originator looks on from their box seat. Whisk together and bring to a near-boil—and […]
BY MAX BURBANK December 12, 2019: A cluster of patients in China’s Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan, begin to experience the symptoms of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that does not respond well to standard treatment.—The CDC Museum’s COVID-19 Timeline March 11, 2020: With 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the World […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | I’m generally adept at drawing out my interview subjects, because I’m a pretty good listener and besides, I project a sort of passivity which enables the stars to unburden me with their most private truths. I love the whole process, with me posing insouciant questions, then sitting back and letting them […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | There’s something satisfying about the fact that while self-aggrandizing lawmakers in Tennessee and other states were spending 2022/2023 trying to limit, license, discourage, and otherwise disavow drag, Sherry Vine and friends were creating six episodes of variety television that plays such pomposity for laughs, while putting the pursuit of cock where […]