Celebrated drag queen jumps into ‘Angels’ role
Performer drops dresses to play male nurse in revival of Kushner’s play
Caldwell Tidicue scratches his beard. It still felt, he says, a little “new” having one. For the past 10 years or so, he’d kept his face smooth. Makeup goes on easier that way, and Tidicue has to layer it on when he takes the stage as Bob the Drag Queen, best known as one of the winners (and fan favorites) from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
But — and this was in late March — it had been three weeks since he’d done drag, the longest he’d been out of drag since he started, so there wasn’t much of a reason to worry about shaving. Instead, he’d been focused on rehearsals for Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s three-month run of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play “Angels in America.” Tidicue is playing the role of Belize, a straight-talking nurse and former drag queen.
The rehearsal schedule for the production, which includes both parts of the sprawling epic about AIDS, gay identity, politics and personal relationships, was intense. Eight hours a day, six days a week for two months.
“This is the longest rehearsal process I’ve ever done for anything,” Tidicue said before the play opened in previews last week. “It is a lot. It is a lot. I just want to get on the stage. I’m ready to get on the stage.” (The theater had promised to buy him lunch if he’d give up his hour-long break for a day to do an interview. So, he ordered Thai.)
Tidicue isn’t new to acting. He studied it in college. And he’s done some film and television projects recently. But it’s been a decade since he’s been in a production like this, with large, moving set pieces. And his drag, though performance, isn’t really a put-on character. It’s just Tidicue in, as he put it, a “fabulous outfit.”
But playwright Tony Kushner had seen his work as Bob, and thought he’d make a good Belize, so he recommended he audition. And when Tony Kushner recom-
mends you audition, Tidicue says, you audition. Even if it means putting drag on hold. “I’m really grateful actually that he did see that in me,” Tidicue says.
“He’s a great performer, but that doesn’t tell you if somebody is going to be able to act in ‘Angels in America,’ ” says the play’s director, Tony Taccone. “It obviously helped that Caldwell — he really, really wanted to do it. He wanted to prove he’s legit, and this is going to do it.”
Part of his grasp of the character, Taccone and Caldwell agree, has to do with some of the biographical similarities. Both drag queens. Both black queer men. Both the sort of people who don’t worry so much — in Tidicue’s words — about being “nice” as they do about being “good.”
“He is a hard-ass, and he will not give you an inch, which I relate, to,” Tidicue says. “The stone face of Belize.”
“Everybody is cast in some ways that are pretty close to the bone,” Taccone says. “The places we’re able to go, the nuances we’re able to reveal … the way we’re able to explore in an imaginative way the lives of the characters, it just feels natural.”
Tidicue gets one of the best runs of dialogue — if not the best — in the whole piece, something colloquially known as the “I Hate America” speech. “The thing is, it’s not really ... everybody remembers it as, like, this showstopper, and he’s talking for 10 minutes.” Tidicue says, before trailing off and suddenly
reciting the lines from memory, getting faster as he goes.
“I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on Earth sounds less like freedom to me.”
He takes a short breath. “That’s the line. But everybody remembers it as (a long monologue) and that’s because that little line is so well written.”
Given the decade away from this sort of production, Tidicue seems to have settled in without much trouble, aside from initial culture shock.
“I was really intimidated because these are all really good actors, talking about references I don’t get,” he says. “They’ve been making jokes about ‘Waiting for Godot.’ And I don’t f—ing know what that show is about.” Now when the conversation turns to “Mean Girls” or “Mommie Dearest,” “then I can relate to that.”
It also helped that he had a standing date to watch the latest episode of “Drag Race” with two of his fellow cast members, Randy Harrison and Benjamin Ismail, at the Port Bar in Oakland.
“It’s my favorite show,” he says, even still. “It’s the most important show to queer culture ever.” Where else, he asks, is there so much representation of queer people of color, trans women and trans people of color?
He already has plans to bring back Bob the Drag Queen for a string of Monday-night cabaretstyle shows starting May 7 at Oasis in San Francisco.
“I have always loved drag. I will always love drag,” he says. “And I’ll probably always do it.”
This new role, this time on a more formal stage is not “me running from ‘Drag Race,’ ” Tidicue says. “It’s just another lane I’m in now.”