‘drag Queens Of Comedy’ Reign At The Castro

“It’s really about how to enjoy tonight’s show,” explained Heklina and Peaches Christ, flipping through slides as if they were pitching a bunch of venture capitalists, not onstage at the “Drag Queens of Comedy” at the Castro Theatre. The brief slideshow, titled the “Herstory of Drag,” began by asserting that drag dates to the days of Shakespeare, when prohibitions on female actors led women’s roles to be fulfilled by men dressed as women. Little is known, they said, about drag queens on Earth before RuPaul, the American drag queen and host of Logo TV’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” reality competition. In the next breath, they described a fellow performer as a “fat rodeo clown who took makeup lessons from Ronald McDonald.” Some 1,498 guests attended each of that night’s two sold-out shows, organized by Sasha Soprano and emceed by Michelle Visage, a bona fide female and a judge on “Drag Race.” At the ticket window, a drag queen held forth, and inside the gilded theater dating to 1922, so did ushers in drag, selling raffle tickets and shots of raspberry lemonade and vodka, three for $10, to benefit the AIDS Emergency Fund and the Breast Cancer Emergency Fund (and also, as an announcer’s voice said over the public address system, “because alcohol will make the drag queens look more like women.”) The predominantly male (and presumably gay) audience ogled go-go dancers onstage, who gyrated to dance music before the show started. Here, shirtless muscular young men wearing bikini briefs and athletic shoes were favored. The evening’s entertainment included performances by Soprano, Coco Peru, Alaska Thunderf—, Jackie Beat, Shangela Laquifa Wadley, Lady Bunny, Willam, and the night’s headliner, Bianca del Rio, a quick-witted insult comedian who was crowned the winner of the sixth season of “Drag Race.” “If you were a drag queen, your name would be Panera,” she quipped, a reference to the bakery product chain. “We did shots of Tequila, and here I am, looking at a 7-foot nun,” Mac said, referring to a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence (a queer order of do-gooder nuns) towering over him.