Sexy siren and drag superstar Sasha Velour won the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2017 with her iconic, signature reveal, which she brings in spades to the Steppenwolf Theatre stage this weekend as part of her The Big Reveal Live Show international tour. It’s a meta-narration on her life and career as a way to be seen, documented and remembered by “writing our own stories” and “rejecting limits to find freedom.”
Velour’s 90-minute juggernaut thrilled the enthusiastic opening night audience by allowing viewers to directly celebrate this historic art form, the “glorious faggotry” currently under senseless attack. Part female impersonator history lesson and part home movie screening, this drag show also showcases Velour’s super-cinched/snatched waist, accomplished wig wrangling and her precise lip-sync acumen (punctuated by a “ferocious red glitter lip”) to Britney and Whitney classics, as well as mid-century trad wife anthems.
Her eyebrow work is also en fleek, with a tuft of hair carefully drawn between the brows, perhaps an homage to her Semitic Russian roots and/or Frida Kahlo.
Participants get to hear about Velour’s grandmothers’ inspiration to the young cross-dresser, and then how she became obsessed with Thisbe in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Via the home movies, we see an 8th-grade Sasha deflate her balloon breasts in the death scene: “If you keep stabbing, something will pop,” she reminisces.
The simple stage set-up (by Cosette “Ettie” Pin and Janelle Krone) of a mysterious chair, shag rug, old-school TV and princess (natch) phone is dominated by a screen in the back, which shows little Sasha growing up in Champaign-Urbana, among other places, as well as animations by Romane Wach and Sweaty Eddie.
Some projection vignettes work alone during costume changes or enhance Velour’s onstage performance. This queen is also a freelance designer and illustrator, carrying on the queer comics tradition, as well as a book-hawker for her own tome The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, written in 2023, which she’ll sign after the show.
Throughout the pandemic and into authoritarianism, I turned to drag queens and the Drag Race series for DEI comfort (undying thanks for that). Although often surrounded by aggressive marketing, cheap puns and sometimes stupid stunts, the final televised runways never cease to amaze. There are concepts I’ve never seen before on every single Drag Race strut over the decades. The drag community’s creativity remains astounding (but watch seasons on free services like Philo and Sling, NOT Paramount+, which recently capitulated to the fascists).
Sasha Velour is a proud and engaging standard-bearer of the drag tradition of protest and joy, history and histrionics, subversion and silliness, ferocity and fun, a beatdown and a bold lip.
Support these fabulous queer voices while you can.
Sasha Velour’s The Big Reveal Live Show runs at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, today, August 2, at 8pm and tomorrow, Sunday, August 3, at 7pm. Tickets are $44-$107.
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