Exalting women in a slightly odd mode
When Justin Sayre dons femininity, it isn’t drag, not exactly. It’s more an act of worship, the gender performance equivalent of imitation as the sincerest form of flattery.
In his new solo cabaret show, “I’m Gorgeous Inside,” he purrs his opening lyrics — “I’ve got lots of problems, female trouble,” a cover of rock band Those Darlins — without knowing winks, without caricature, without anything over the top. At the show’s onenight-only run at Oasis on Saturday, Sept. 30, he sang in a way that you almost never see from male performers — with delicate, refined hand gestures, with sweetness and innocence in his mien. (Kitten on the Keys, a.k.a. Suzanne Ramsey, accompanied him on the piano.)
Form contrasted delectably with content, though, the way his full beard and languorous gum chewing (percolating saliva was the other musical accompaniment throughout the show) contrasted with his elegant, vintage bohemian ensemble: silver one-piece romper, beads, burgundy beret and matching double-strapped
heels. This show is “about bad girls,” he said, the ones “who saw the status quo and said, ‘That’s a trick,’ ” the ones who “wore a halter top to a funeral,” whom you’d never “let into your house”; you’d “meet them for coffee.”
It’s about “the prostitutes who’ve influenced my life,” and these women are many in number, dating from his childhood in Forty Fort, Pa., to when he moved to New York “a hiccup before” the year 2000, to the present. Sayre’s mission is to deify our country’s untouchables, to reframe their deviance as “asking for more,” as broadening the scope of possibility for all of us.
He mostly gets away with this as a man because he’s not pursuing these women for sex. (Sayre, who’s based in Los Angeles, is best known for his other solo show, “The Meeting* of the International Order of Sodomites.”) But a lot of jokes fail to land, partly because Sayre never acknowledges that many women are forced into prostitution. (The Oasis audience usually came around, though, after he made fun of himself for failed bits or chastised us for our lack of enthusiasm: “That was a weird one. I thought we’d be able to laugh at that.”) Even though many members of his audience likely are enlightened enough to not require a lecture on the exploitation of sex workers, talking about prostitution solely as if it’s a choice, or as a trade only the coolest humans can aspire to, makes his fetishization of them feel a little queasy.
More successful is Sayre’s one-of-a-kind stage persona: articulate and sharply observant of that which most of us willfully blind ourselves to, regal yet a little sloppy, with the occasional stray syllable veering British or Southern or singsong. Covering singers from Ani DiFranco to Patsy Cline, he loses hold on pitch when he belts, but his voice was made for the blues, with a fiendish ratcheting from one register to a higher one, with a gentle vibrato he eases into at just the right moment in a sustain.
If the show hasn’t yet struck the right balance in its humor, its musical choices are artful, perfectly calibrated to the idea of elevating the low: wry and earnest, mournful yet full of pride.