Two decades ago, when Golden Girls Live! was formulated in local theatrical wiz Mike Finn’s Hayes Valley living room, the idea of San Francisco drag queens inhabiting the roles of those four sassy sitcom goddesses from Miami still carried a whiff of anarchic, subversive glee. The quartet of wise-cracking seniors was rumored to have been written as gay men, after all, and broke much new ground in the 1980s in plots that affirmed the lives of queer people—so this was a fabulous case of reclamation.
The project had a punk rock pedigree, too, with late drag stalwart Heklina—whose T-Shack party basically created the blood-drenched, off-the-rails style of San Francisco drag in the 1990s—gathering a cast of equally wild fellow performers to put on a cute little show that channeled the independent energy of underground urban theater.
Fast-forward 19 years—past “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” past the global embrace and subsequent politicized hysteria over drag—and now Golden Girls Live! The Christmas Episodes (though December 22) is filling the 1667-person Curran Theatre with comforting holiday cheer, as drag favorites faithfully and hilariously fill out the shoulder-padded roles with a dedication that never oversteps the boundaries of taste. Golden Girls Live! is our LGBT Hamilton, an oasis of liberal wish-fulfillment that still delights even as it dare not actually stir any troubled contemporary waters.
It’s a tradition. And we’re more than happy to fall into the soothing arms Dorothy (Coco Peru), Blanche (the brilliant Matthew Martin), Rose (Golden Girls Live! director D’Arcy Drollinger) and mother Sophia (legend Holotta Tymes) as the weather outside gets frightful in terms of our very existence.
This Golden Girls Live! takes on two famous episodes—one about Dorothy’s lesbian friend (Manuel Caneri) and one about her anti-Semitic literary hero (Michael Phillis)—that feature some canonical lines, cathartic tell-offs, fabulous looks, and, of course, cheesecake. There’s barely any deviation from the original scripts. The spectacular sequined outfits by Katie Dowse and kitsch-o-mania set by Matt Owens are so spot-on they garner their own applause. If you’ve ever wondered how many copper Jell-O molds can fit in a kitchen, here ya go.
Perhaps a little less successful are the Christmas carol singalongs with pianist Tom Shaw that punctuate the proceedings. Shaw (recently famous from that viral “Taste the Biscuits” ditty) did his best on opening night to get the crowd gently a-rockin’ around the Christmas tree, but it was hard going. Back when most of us were still being rejected by our families, this collective nostalgia was lovely, but now with Trump about to enter a second term, not many are eager to sing “Fa La La.”
That points to a slight weakness of the production for me—while the performers more than flood the building with their charisma (one lusty backwards glance from Martin’s Blanche can slay multitudes), the whole thing could go a bit more gonzo, a bit further than comfy ol’ camp. When it was at the much more intimate Victoria Theatre, things like Rose’s constant, pill-popper-like, wide-eyed reactions, or the fact Sophia sounds less an old Sicilian woman and more a mob wife from Queens, added a community theater feel that made for a family affair. We were all in on the in-jokes (and came from a generation that remembered the original broadcasts), and that was probably enough.
Now, in the broader auditorium with a broader audience, a little needs to go a longer way. Not that I expect explosions and beheadings, but maybe a set change or more jingles from the past 50 years would be cute? Could the wink-wink dig a little deeper into the nudge-nudge? Bringing out the original singer of the theme song on opening night was a hint of how grand the proceedings can be. Still, this is a wonderful outing for the whole (adult) family, and a cozy reminder of how central San Francisco is to drag history—and how much that history has changed.
GOLDEN GIRLS LIVE! THE CHRISTMAS EPISODES through December 22 at the Curran Theatre, SF. More info here.
