From Elvis impersonator to lip-syncing drag queen: The Legend of Georgia McBride comes to Vancouver
The Arts Club Theatre’s production celebrates drag with a whole lot of humour and heart
Jacob Woike, The Legend of Georgia McBride. Photo by Pink Monkey Studios
The Arts Club Theatre Company presents The Legend of Georgia McBride from April 20 to May 21 (with opening night on April 26) at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage
THE LEGEND OF Georgia McBride is a comedy about an Elvis impersonator turned drag queen, but like drag itself, there’s a whole lot of power, soul, and meaning behind the humour and glitter. That’s what first drew local director Jamie King to Matthew López’s play, which had its world premiere in the U.S. nearly a decade ago. With homophobia and transphobia ever-present, drag storytimes being cancelled across Canada and the U.S. because of protests and threats, and anti-LGBTQ+ bills south of the border hitting record highs, the show’s upcoming Vancouver run at The Arts Club Theatre, King says, feels all the more significant.
“This is a chance to experience and promote and celebrate the joy and the generosity and that the dynamic of queerness and queer spaces has been,” King says in a Zoom interview with Stir alongside lead cast member Jacob Woike. “It was a huge reason that I wanted to start doing the script, and then now it has just felt more and more important as we've moved into the rehearsal process as the world has continued to shift and… get scary. We get to do something that's fun and funny and silly and still has heart and still has a message.
“We get to show how easy it is to build a drag queen and how much that means to everyone,” King adds. “In a time where drag is being mandated against, when it's being suppressed, when it's being pushed away, we build a drag queen in front of you and show you how silly and funny and heartfelt it is and that it's not a scary thing.
Adds Woike: “And it's not dangerous.”
“Right, it’s not gonna hurt anyone,” King says. “It is a beautiful, joyful, silly, heartfelt expression of things that we just feel we don't get to do or don't get to say in the bodies that we were born in.”
As Casey, Woike plays the down-on-his-luck Elvis impersonator whose dive-bar gig gets scrapped right when he finds out his wife, Jo (Monice Peter), is pregnant. A B-level drag show has been brought in to replace him, and when the act winds up short a queen one night, Casey steps in to replace her, stepping into her stilettos as the glamourous Georgia McBride.
“Looking back, when Elvis first started performing live, he was very promiscuous in a way and it was challenged a lot by kind of the expectations of what men were supposed to do on stage as a musician,” Woike says. “He kind of overtly had this very raw sexual energy and I think it threatened a lot of people.”
“It was looked at as perverse,” King adds.
“He kind of disrupted the status quo that way,” Woike says. “The show opens with an Elvis impersonator, and here we are, 60 to 70 years later, and Elvis is just so widely accepted as this icon and this musician that globally has been appreciated by so many people. And the show goes into a story involving drag and involving queer folks, and that is now kind of the disruption: Drag sits at the forefront, and it's pushing those perimeters and challenging those boundaries and expectations of gender and presentation. Drag was born from oppression, and it was born for the need and the desire to push boundaries, to challenge something, to say this is who I am or this is who I can be and that should be okay. And even though it was born out of that and has had decades of life since then, with RuPaul and shows like that, it’s still trying to assert itself.”
“It’s commercialized and yet it is still a protest,” King says. “It’s an interesting thing to be riding that line right now where it’s so prevalent, but it also is such a minority and it is so provocative. It's built to be provocative because that's its purpose.”
Woike has never performed in drag, though he has enjoyed the artform as a spectator for a decade. To bring Georgia McBride and the other drag queens to life—to accurately convey the physical, emotional, and mental transformation—the team enlisted Joan-E Rivers (Robert Kaiser) as a consultant. For his part, Woike studied the local and international drag figures he follows as well as pop icons such as Edith Piaf, doing heritage-based research into drag’s cultural and political context. For viewers, the show is not only filled with fun and risqué numbers but it also gives a glimpse into the lives of drag queens in and out of the spotlight.
“Everyone should go support their local drag scene,” Woike says. “Obviously you can get a lot out of those performances, and there is a certain level of like interaction and community that exists there—but we don't see what happens backstage. We don't have context for what these people go through outside of drag, outside of these jobs and these roles that they take on. Whereas in this show, you kind of get the whole picture. We show you what happens on stage, backstage, in the minds of these people, what's happened before they enter this experience and before all these folks came together. So it just provides an opportunity for people to kind of have an in and maybe gain a bit more perspective on what drag is to these people who do drag.
“The show is written in such a way that you get to see this straight, cis white guy go through these motions and provides an in for a lot of heterosexual, cisgender people who might not have the same relation to drag or might not have had the same opportunities to understand really what drag is and who these people are and how beautiful this community really is, you know? It shows how much joy there is in drag and how pure it is. In a lot of ways, it's just a form of art that brings people together.”
The Arts Club Theatre Company’s production of The Legend of Georgia McBride also stars Greg Armstrong-Morris, Karthik Kadam, and Ron Kennell. The show features choreography by Joe Tuliao, set design by Brian Ball , costume design by Jessica Oostergo, lighting design by Sophia Tang, and sound design by Nancy Tam.
“For all the bigness of these topics that we're talking about, for all the immensity and the political nature of them, this show at its heart is a comedy,” King says. “It’s meant to bring us together through humour.
“It’s bringing a straight white male into a queer space, and it does that with a lot of humour and a lot of care and a lot of jokes maybe not everyone knows. It’s very purposefully done with humour, because humour is a really great leveller. It’s one of those things that brings everyone to the same level. It’s an extraordinary device to build together the voice of the community.”
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