Well-worn idea turned on its head
Mismatched duo charms while defying convention
The best sight gag of the season, it turns out, isn’t your lawyer in his Christmas reindeer knitted vest. It’s the vision of earthly improbabilities conjured by the Guys in Disguise Christmas show With Bells On. Behold: the pairing of a sad-eyed pipsqueak accountant and a towering, twinkling Christmas tree of a drag queen who evidently takes the show title very seriously.
Ditto the classic yuletide exhortation “don we now our gay apparel,” as she will point out briskly in the course of conversation (gay apparel courtesy of designer Norman J. MacDonald).
Darrin Hagen’s fizzy and festive little play throws these urban neighbours together — the melancholy dweeb (James Hamilton) and the glorious giant tannenbaum (Paul Welch) — in a highrise elevator stuck between floors on a crucial Saturday night before Christmas. In one way, of course, this is an homage, with red lipstick and a wink, to a time-honoured, not to say hoary, dramatic scenario. Mismatched strangers — nun and hooker, vegan and cannibal, cop and crook, nudist and prude, etc. — are trapped together in a cab or a cave or the United flight to Chicago, by prairie dust storm or earthquake or the apocalypse, until their native hostilities melt as they discover, lo and behold, what they have in common.
This is the conventional architecture of With Bells On, to be sure. But what gives With Bells On its unexpected charm is that Ted, our milquetoast sadsack and apparently the ultimate in straightness, isn’t the shockable prig or homophobe you’d expect. His reactions, conveyed with delicate comic nuance by Hamilton, are unexpected all down the line. He’s actually curious about the exotic creature he’s met. On the rebound from divorce, he’s shaky in the self-esteem department, and attracted to confidence. Getting stuck in the elevator strikes him as symbolic, a typically inauspicious start to his first tentative foray into the world. More than that I shouldn’t reveal, except to note that drag queens in down-market high rises could do a lot worse than Ted for neighbours.
It’s Natasha who’s the prickly, defensive, hostile one — full of preconceptions, caustic, crabby, and very funny in Welch’s performance. She’s on a timetable; if she doesn’t arrive at the Magic Crystal Palace by midnight, her chance to be Christmas Queen will be lost forever. The lanky actor, who cuts an imposing figure, postures grandly, and at seven feet or so in high heels, grand is, in fact, the operative word — as in opera. That sequined bosom is a long, long way from the ground. Even Natasha’s diction is exotic, and full of mid-Atlantic affectations. Watching the artifice evaporate, as Natasha’s longdormant curiosity about her nondescript fellow traveller is finally elicited, is one of the delights of the show.
Straight or gay? Doesn’t matter, either to the characters or the show. With Bells On isn’t about that. It has way more to do with the clarion call of adventure, of stepping gaily forth outside the proverbial comfort zone, and finding a buddy with which to do it. Be brave, have fun, it tells us. It’s a modest and amiable show that way, for all its bitchy glam jokes.
But hey, drag is about showbiz. And there’s a very funny production number to prove it.