San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Theater Taylor Mac serves up “Holiday Sauce” when we need it most.
When Taylor Mac bids “Merry Christmas” on the first track of the new album “Holiday Sauce,” the vibe isn’t inviting Christmas hearth but gaping hellmouth. Mac’s voice keens and wails, sounding an alarm that the season and you, the listener, have triggered. This “Merry Christmas” is no festive, neighborly wish, but a hex.
On the second track, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” Mac, who uses the gender pronoun “judy” (in honor of Judy Garland), hisses as a snake on the “s” sound in “rest” and “Christ.” When Mac reaches the lyric “to save us all from Satan’s power,” backed by a guitar ready to shred, the song unlocks, triumphantly: This Christmas carol is sung from the devil’s point of view.
The album “Holiday Sauce,” which was released Nov. 13 (out on CD or available to download at www.taylormacholidaysauce.com), follows the 2018 production of Mac’s stage show of the same name that was copresented by the Curran and Pomegranate Arts and coproduced by Pomegranate Arts and Nature’s Darlings. Now the Curran, in partnership with other arts companies around the world, is slated to broadcast a digital version of the performance — “Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce ... Pandemic!” — live Saturday, Dec. 12, and on demand Dec. 13Jan. 2.
The 45minute online show marks the Curran’s first offering since the pandemic shuttered “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in March.
For all judy’s musical frolicking in the River Styx, Mac is also one of the most inviting, generous and joyful stage performers currently working. You can see it even in Mac’s Instagram videos of oneoff songs recorded while sheltering in place — that pandemicera medium that in many other theater artists’ hands feels provisional, halfhearted. But stumble upon Mac tuning judy’s banjo in your newsfeed, and you might be inclined to gasp, look around and whisper, “Who, me?” Mac can give judy’s whole self to you just through twinkly eye contact and a mischievous smile. It’s too big a gift to receive, and it loses nary a spark of luster when mediated by a screen.
The three versions of “Holiday Sauce” feature many of the same songs, which range from rock covers to Mac originals to cherished carols that Mac rips open, dissects, refracts. It’s the same imagination and intelligence, always divining what society’s insidious hidden narrative is, then interrupting it, that brought us “The Lily’s Revenge” and “A 24Decade History of Popular Music.”
The version of “Silent Night” on the “Holiday Sauce” album, for instance, is no straitlaced chorale. Arranger and longtime Mac collaborator Matt Ray slows the melody way down to find what’s sloppy and sassy in between the lines. He makes a carol about birth into a jazzy secondline funeral parade. When Mac performed “Holiday Sauce” in person at the Curran, judy referred to the show as “Christmas as calamity.” At one point late in the performance, judy revealed that it wasn’t a Christmas show at all, that judy had just marketed it that way to get us to come.
All along, “Holiday Sauce” was secretly a mourning ritual for Mother Flawless Sabrina, the New York City drag queen who died in 2017 and whom Mac calls judy’s “drag mother.”
2020’s holiday season has caught up with the vision Mac shared with the Bay Area in 2018. This whole year, not just Christmas, is calamity, and now we’re all in mourning. We grieve loved ones who died of the coronavirus, jobs lost, social lives cut off, routines upended — and now holiday traditions discontinued.
But one of the strengths of “Holiday Sauce,” in each of its incarnations, is Mac’s point that idealized Christmas has never been available to some of us — depending on your social class, your sexuality, your gender identity, your family history. Judy’s song “Christmas With Grandma,” featuring just Mac’s vocals and ukulele, remembers two family holidays each discolored by different kinds of yellow bodily fluids.
The chosen family Mac forges over the years is exactly what “Holiday Sauce” mourns in coming out as a collective grief ceremony for Mother Flawless Sabrina. It is thus a multilayered grief: grief for the loss of Sabrina, then a wound reopened for the biological family Sabrina and her ilk replaced.
Those who live outside gender and sexuality norms perhaps know more about grief than the rest of us do. By serving “Holiday Sauce” two new ways in 2020, Mac offers the gift of wisdom. Mac shows us not just how to mourn, but how to mourn while tinseled and spangled from top to bottom and beyond, how to mourn and keep on singing.