all by myself
by
Douglas Messerli
Joey
Arias (performer), Basil Twist (director) Arias with a Twist / Redcat
(Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at The Walt Disney Concert Hall, November
21, 2009
A few days after seeing Michael Jackson’s This
Is It, I attended a performance of the drag queen Joey Arias directed by
Basil Twist. Like Jackson, Arias is an excellent performer, but here it is the
voice that dominates, not the feet. For his great dance finale, Twist provides
him with dozens of dancing legs and scene right out of Busby Berkeley, yet
those high kicking gams are puppets, not Arias' own slim limbs.
While Jackson worked big, on a gargantuan scale, Arias does more with small, working with the stunning sets and costumes of Twist, Thierry Manfred Mugler, and Chris March.
Without any apparent logic, Arias begins his vocal narrative as a captive in a alien spaceship, attentively watched over by alien men, until, evidently thrust out of this spatial Eden she falls through space into a kind of campy corduroy-covered jungle, an earthly Eden with a large python slithering through its confines.
Without any apparent logic, Arias begins
his vocal narrative as a captive in an alien spaceship, attentively watched
over by alien men, until, evidently thrust out of this spatial Eden she falls
through space into a kind of campy corduroy-covered jungle, an earthly Eden
with a large python slithering through its confines.
Evidently Arias is thrown out of that
heaven as well, ending up, inevitably, in Hell, sexually entrapped by Satan's
slaves and soon after wrapped in the arms of a giant squid.
Appearing like a slightly pouting, perhaps
betrayed dominatrix with a long ponytail, Arias sings out in raspy voice
through an equally hair-extended mic in a manner that is often more
interpretive than Madonna or even Bette Midler, beginning with Led Zeppelin's
"Kashmir" and moving quickly into Lennon and McCartney's "Lucy
in the Sky with Diamonds." Her moving version of Eric Carmen's "All
By Myself" and the Billie Holliday-like rendition of "You
Changed" is vocally more powerful than anything Michael Jackson might have
spit out.
Suddenly it's time for her to get herself
down to The Great White Way, but her talent is so enormous that when she
arrives in Manhattan she is the size of King Kong, swallowing up male
passengers on trains and in taxis as she moves through New York's
neighborhoods, ending up in a scene right out of a motion picture musical.
Like Jackson's missing person, Arias'
twisted being—that is, his persona—is just that, a figure of true talent, funny
and entertaining enough for anyone to enjoy, but also a kind of monster who can
never quite fit into everyday life.
Los
Angeles, November 22, 2009
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (November 2009), USTheater, Opera and
Performance (September 2010).
