Shaun de Waal
review OFTHEWEEK
Two enjoyable drag shows now on in Johannesburg cover the range from mainstream comedy to the engagingly trashy, with variable results.
British Ceri Dupree is visiting the Civic Theatre with Eager Divas, a show of impressions of famous female figures such as Camilla Parker-Bowles, Tina Turner and Mae West. The skill here is in the impersonation, in Turner’s wig-tossing, strutting style, or Edith
Piaf’s forlorn little-sparrowisms, exaggerated to comic effect and Dupree is very good at it. Cleverly, the costume changes are bridged by using a backlit screen, so we can watch Dupree transform himself instead of just tapping our toes to the piped music.
Dupree is a rapid-fire comic, spattering the audience with a stream of jokes, some more original than others. In the case of West, for instance, he has famous lines to work with; in the case of Dame Edna Everage, he has to hand
a readymade drag character invented by someone else. Both of these work well, though West may be more
familiar to most of Dupree’s audience through other impersonators than through any memory of the real woman.
Best of all is Shirley Bassey, in which the impersonation comes together with the wittily revised lyrics of one of her showstopping tunes. The send-up comments on the persona of the diva, giving it an extra edge. Dupree does a similar thing with the already highly stylised Marlene Dietrich (once a drag staple), though the plastic-surgery jokes have been told about so many others.
His Pamela Anderson, on the other hand, does no more than demonstrate Dupree’s ability to tuck well, and I saw little point in the Piaf-by-numbers or in Carole Channing South Africans are unlikely to have much idea who she is. His Turner and Macy Gray are amusing take-offs, though it would have been interesting to see whether Dupree could do with them what he did with Bassey instead of simply miming to their songs.
Miming is dominant in The Glitter Sisters’ A Night with Oscar (Colosseo restaurant, Montecasino), meaning, I think, Oscar as in the Academy Awards, and/or Oscar as in Hammerstein, though the show only gestures in that direction. It features a team of performers, though Tequila Sheila (shouldn’t that be the other way around?), is clearly the star of the show. She is created by Wayne Scott, who obviously has some performance training, evident particularly in his embodiment of the Liza Minnelli of Cabaret.
In contrast to Dupree’s slick professionalism, The Glitter Sisters are in the slightly amateurish drag cabaret tradition, with audience banter between songs and some hilarious interactions between the performers as they mock their own staged ineptitude and bitchiness. In line with that tradition, too, it takes ages to get them on the stage (just another Dora, darling), and ages to get them off.
As with Dupree, who could have dropped a couple of numbers and thus dispensed with the interval, some of A Night with Oscar could have gone without being missed. Drag performers are supposed to be a bit tacky and tasteless, but doing the racially stereotyped “Hau medem” routine isn’t even very funny.
Yet Scott shines in the send-up of Natanil that transposes the song from Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat into Any Cream Will Do, and the reworked “Simon and Carbuncle” number Sounds of Sirens is an amusing comment on crime in South Africa. He is given good support by his fellow queens.
Both shows end with My Way odd, in Dupree’s case, since his stock-in-trade is doing it their way. Both Dupree and Scott do it out of costume, enacting the established revelation of the “real” performer at the end. Scott’s version works better, partly because he does it while actually stripping off his costume and make-up, and partly because he mimes it to a female vocalist’s rendition. Dupree does it straight, and in his own, rather strident voice, which seems incapable of what little subtlety that overplayed song requires.
Eager Divas runs at the Tesson Theatre, Civic Theatre, until July 8. The Glitter Sisters appear at Colosseo restaurant on Wednesday nights at 8.30pm. For dinner bookings, Tel: (011) 511 0239