Before the Texas legislature gets wind of Matthew López’s drag-friendly The Legend of Georgia McBride, now exuberantly swishing through Stages, I suggest you sashay, mince, or strut over to the theater, apply a bit of midnight aubergine eyeliner, wrap yourself in a boa, put on the falsies, and hot glue enough spangles on your costume to experience drag with a sweet rom-com vengeance.
The play is a delight, a gay souffle with enough thought in its fluffy-wigged head to give you pause, but only for a moment. Rexy’s late-in-the-play rant about the historic purpose of drag, its influence, its power, its continuous struggle, slaps us awake but appears from another play, one designed not to please so thoroughly. Of course, this is López at his pulpit, preaching at high dudgeon.
The outrage lasts only a moment (wondrously performed though by Jarred Tettey in full diva mode), but the spiel trips up the comedy, like a Christian Louboutin stiletto stuck in a manhole. Yet it allows our protagonist, straight Casey (Jeremy Gee), who dons drag because it’s the only way out when he’s fired as an Elvis impersonator at Cleo’s dive bar in Panama City Beach, Florida, to finally understand what he’s doing in a dress and high heels.
Lovable yet irresponsible, married Casey is a perennial screw-up. He’s maxed out his credit cards, to the admonishment of wife Jo (a most sympathetic Krystal Uchem), and lives life without worry. Money will come, he purrs to his exasperated wife, see, I’ve just bought a new Elvis costume to boast interest, which is fading fast. When Jo announces she’s pregnant, Casey’s over the moon, not bothering about the rent that’s overdue or the financial reefs the couple is inevitably heading into. There’s a tsunami coming, but Casey remains sunny, adolescent, and enthusiastically blithe.
When he’s fired by club owner Eddie (a magnetic Brandon Morgan, who channels every musical MC since Joel Grey), Casey’s downgraded to bartender. But his fairy godmother appears in the form of maternal drag queen deluxe, Miss Tracy Mills (Seán Patrick Judge in delicious bitchy form in tower-high wig and clown-like makeup), who convinces Casey to go on when Tracy’s partner Rexy passes out drunk. Casey gets a quick makeover as Edith Piaf and told to “lip sync or swim” using “watermelon motherfucker” as the words to see her through the karaoke routine.
Casey survives, improves, and even enjoys the transformation. He becomes a better man when he becomes a better woman. Prodded by Tracy to develop her own drag persona, Casey soon transforms into the headliner Georgia McBride. He has not told his wife where all the new money has come from.
Like Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece, we anticipate the confrontation. But first, we have the drag numbers. Too many, I fear, though Barry Doss’s metamorphosing costumes are a wonder to behold – tacky and so right. The sight of Judge as the Statue of Liberty, using her torch as microphone as she wails through the “Star Spangled Banner,” is worth the admission price. Listening to Judge throw “shade” and quip López’s many Wildesque bot mots are the other reasons. He/she is perfection.
López is one of America’s hottest playwrights, and his dramas always revolve around gay issues. The Whipping Man, with its subtle gay subtext of freed slave and master, was his first big hit, and Stages’ production was a scorching highlight of its 2014 season. His enduring work, surely, is The Inheritance (2018), a two-part epic about post-AIDS survivors and what they owe to their forebears. A Tony and every-other-theater-prize-winner imaginable, the drama is a gut-buster of emotional and psychic power which leaves you in a torrent of tears. McBride (2014) came before and is much softer. It’s just as gay, just more audience-friendly and easy to digest.
Go, eat it up.
The Legend of Georgia McBride continues through July 2 at 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at Stages, 600 Rosine. For more information, call 713-527-0123 or visit stageshouston.com. $30-$84.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
