11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Sasha Velour's ‘Big Reveal' redraws the boundaries of drag and theater
Other performers might dread glitches during shows. Sasha Velour makes them her co-stars.
Her 'The Big Reveal Live Show!' offers no straightforward lip sync. Phone rings, TV static and vertical colored bars, smashed dishes, recording skips, computer viruses and flickering lights constantly interrupt her drag numbers, video art, autobiographical anecdotes and mini lectures on drag history and theory.
But if these on-purpose mistakes rip the fabric of the mostly solo show, which opened Wednesday, June 4, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the 'RuPaul's Drag Race' champion, author and Berkeley native widens them into wormholes and crawls inside to do battle with them. As she tries to claw back control of her bit, she might wind up on the floor in tears, but she's the winner all the same.
It's partly a clown show: the garish makeup, the padded body parts, the nightmarish facial expressions, the wordless physical theater fight against absurdist forces too large to understand. But in all those gaffes, larger ideas are also at work.
Imperfection is key to understanding drag and camp more generally, Velour says at one point. The art form doesn't work if you don't have self-awareness — if you don't understand your flaws but 'press on' anyway. (The implied corollary: Someone like Trump couldn't do camp even if he wanted to.)
In a tough time for theater locally and nationwide, with companies scaling back or closing as funding sources dwindle, 'The Big Reveal Live Show!' suggests that institutional theater programming more drag might be one way forward. Audience members certainly showed up on Wednesday, some even glammed up in drag as opposed to the standard Berkeley Rep audience uniform of earth tones and sensible shoes.
And Velour's show itself is more daring, artistic and intellectual than a lot of straight plays. Some of her patter — 'After so many years of backlash,' 'Drag serves as a mirror,' 'We are here, and we are not going away' — is boilerplate; the points might be more effectively made without didacticism. But other bits of monologue evince the scholarly yet frisky understanding of drag that undergirds her book, also called 'The Big Reveal,' with the subtitle 'An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag.'
'Queerness isn't shocking or groundbreaking at all,' she says in the show. 'It's normal. It's boring.' Cultures throughout history have had some kind of drag performance, she points out — even the American military in World War II. It only becomes threatening, she says, when it's no longer performed by straight men.
Her costumes — by Diego Montoya Studio, Pierretta Viktori, Jazzmint Dash, Gloria Swansong and Casey Caldwell — are celestial wonders. One skirt hem resembles the orbit of the sometime-planet Pluto, both elliptical and noncoplanar, forming part of an outfit that looks like a bottle of pink Champagne frozen right in the moment of exploding. Another piece blurs the boundary between human and furniture.
In one heart-stopping moment, she lines herself up with an outline of a human form projected on a large screen behind her. Without any perceptible change in lighting, she seems to change color, blazing in the gold of a desert sunset. Graffiti gets written on her, and ropes wrap around her; body parts metamorphose and enlarge. Your eyes search for signs as to what's projected and what's tangible. She dissolves in flames. By the end, you half expect her to be able to step through the screen and get swallowed whole, the wormholes covering their tracks like magic.
As Velour finds the deviant in the familiar — talk shows, Disney princesses having animal friends, audio montages of iconic phone calls in film, the pixelated desktop of 1990s-era Windows — she makes the case that drag is available to everyone, no matter how weird or normie you are.
That thing that tickles you? That you find yourself returning to again and again? Drag is a way you can talk about it, and it belongs on every stage and in every sitting room in America.
