Lydia’s Blog

There are many things I doubt about myself, as is surely true of all of us. Am I a good director? Am I cut out for a life in the bizarre, self-involved cesspool that is the world of opera? Am I as smart as I think I am? Is The Kittensnake just a stupid platform for my unrelenting vanity?

Amid these doubts, there has been one element in myself that I have never called into doubt…for which I’ve never had to peer into any existential magic 8 ball. That is the following: I am a great fag hag. I have had years of perineum shaving (“Honey, there’s one spot I can’t get…you grab the razor, I’m gonna lie on my back, hold up my balls and you just try to be gentle…”), why-won’t-that-straight-guy-I-adore-just-let-me-blow-him-just-once sympathetic commiserating and long nights of practicing the fine art of animal husbandry at gay bars to prove this aptitude.

This one great certitude was called into question last night. My lady, Joolz, and I went to the Hollywood Bowl to hear Rufus Wainwright quote an entire Judy Garland concert from 1961. Possibly the least heterosexual public entertainment event ever, right? Well yes. And horribly so.

Before the concert, I didn’t know Rufus Wainwright from Ryan Seacrest. For some reason I had gotten it into my head that we were going to see Tom Waits sing Judy Garland…which would have at least been interesting.

There was nothing good about this concert. It looked as though some ultra-gay karaoke enthusiast was scouted by some shitty lounge-show producer that basically only wanted this kid’s brownberry…and attempted to conquer said brownberry by giving said ultra-gay karaoke enthusiast a show of his own at some trashy dive.

And then the trashy dive turned out to be the Hollywood Bowl. Horror.

Through my Haggery over the last fourteen years or so (since I was just a wee lass), my boys have introduced me to many gay musical icons whom I’ve listened to and learned to love, like Ethel Merman, Betty Buckley, Elaine Paige, Audra MacDonald, Eartha Kitt, Patti LuPone, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Dionne Warwick, and even Barbra Streisand. Mr. Wainwright decided to channel none of these legends in his whiny, questionably pitched renditions of seminal Judy Garland classics.

We had the misfortune of sitting unnervingly close to one of the Bowl’s megascreens…giving us a close-up view of one of the least engaging live performers I’ve ever seen (and I work in opera, folks). It allowed me to see that the man’s reedy, unsteady tones were produced by a head tossed back (theoretically with emotion, but probably more to give the audience more of an “if you were on top of me” view) and a jaw jutted unnaturally forward. On climactic tones (or the ones I remember being climactic from having heard Judy Garland herself sing), Mr. Wainwright offered a wilting queef of a line…his breaths and cheek-against-teeth smacking made unpleasantly loud by the fact the Bowl’s sound people had to jack his mike up so high, in order to make his blazing vocal talent at all audible over the orchestra.

The one thing less tolerable than Wainwright’s singing was his patter. In one of the least classy caricatures of gayness ever, the man would, like, lisssp and, like, hum and haw and, like, stammer, and like, bat his eyes whilst delivering a string of increasingly obnoxious non-anecdotes. For example: “Like, did you guys see that? Like, there were just two drops of rain here on the stage and like, it kind of makes me feel, like, that Judy’s here tonight. You know you guys, before like the show tonight. It was, like, so amazing. Like I felt like she was in my dressing room and I was like, hey Judy. And so yeah. Look. Another drop. That’s like, crazy you guys.”

He or his producers also decided to pad the program with several other fourth-rate performers. For instance, the impressively mediocre Garland progeny, Lorna Luft. Two other members of the Wainwright crew joined their boy as well…the similarly limited Chanteuse, Martha Wainwright, and his mother, a jazz pianist who embarrassingly choked through a flash transposition of a classic ballad toward the end of the program.

The program’s conductor was another questionably talented pretty boy, who filled out his dull, incredibly square delivery of the orchestral arrangements with smoldering, pouty glances toward the camera.

What I require from gay entertainment is either quality or irony. The mixture of the two is of course preferable. Gary White, for instance, would have rocked the ever-loving shit out of this program. Or…if the acoustic qualities of the evening weren’t to be in the fore, that’s also okay. Camp it out, you know? Get Lady Bunny or Lipsynka to channel Garland.

But this was neither, and therefore nothing. What some could possibly construe as camp was actually the awkward flailings and coy incoherency of a man in way over his head. The only possible draw I can imagine for a performer like Wainwright is the fact that gay men might find him so imminently fuckable that they’d be willing to overlook his talent-free status and abject vandalism of Judy Garland’s music and legacy.

Would this have annoyed me so much if it had been a hetero Chanteur? I asked myself this question repeatedly. No. Irrelevant, actually. This program could not have been executed as such by a straight performer. Wainwright’s gayness is totally central to his show. It is this gayness, seemingly, that is called upon to supplant any evidence of the presence of an engaging showman.

As I looked around at the hundreds, possibly thousands of people in the audience—largely gay men—raptly hanging onto Wainwright’s every gormless warble, it made me kind of hate them all…and seriously question my status as international power hag.

Me, who first taped together a man’s tits at age 16, while working at a costume-shop-by-day, drag-haunt by night. Can it be that I’m not a good hag? Am I a hater?

I had to soften my brain with a lot of wine in order to repress the tragic idea that I’ve suddenly become a Shirley Temple Black parody…a once-beloved figure who proved to be an arch-conservative and homophobe in her late years.

I should work up that Shirley program. Maybe some idiot will let me have the Bowl.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.