Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: 'Like Disney Princesses, but for adults'

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In confusing, complex times like the one we live in, audiences turn to traditional, old-fashioned entertainment to distract them from the world's problems - you know, like drag queens.

"They're like Disney Princesses, but for adults," says Australian makeup artist and former drag queen Ben Moir, as he works away on transforming a male actor into a larger-than-life woman for the Toronto production of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert - the Musical.

Drag has undeniably been having a moment in the mainstream of late, particularly in musical theatre. The Menier Chocolate Factory's revival of La Cage aux Folles, the 1983 Jerry Herman musical set in a sleazy Saint Tropez drag club, won an Olivier award for best revival of a musical in London, then moved to Broadway and won the Tony in the same category this spring.

Now the musical adaptation of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the cult 1994 road-trip film about Australian drag queens, is making its way to join La Cage aux Folles on the Great White Way after an out-of-town tryout in Toronto that began Tuesday.

Add in the Toronto-bound Billy Elliot musical - which includes a number called Expressing Yourself in which the 11-year-old dancer and his best friend dress up in women's clothing - and Brian Bedford's reprisal of his Stratford Shakespeare Festival performance as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in New York in January, and the Broadway strip has never looked so much like the main drag of drag before.

Not that men dressing up as women and the theatre have ever been strangers. "It's been an aspect of the theatre as long as there's been a theatre," says Charles Busch, the off-Broadway drag legend whose plays include Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and - his current show - The Divine Sister. "It's always been a source of entertainment for the public, whether it's for satiric use, a man playing a woman, or it's creating the perfect illusion."

From Euripides's Medea (who would have been originally played by a male actor, since women were banished from the stage in ancient Greece) to Tyler Perry's Madea, cross-dressing performers have always been popular. But drag queens are another kettle of fish - one that at first seems an odd fit among the commercial, middle-of-the-road fare that dominates Broadway these days.

The term primarily applies to an almost exclusively gay subculture that dates back to around the 1890s and was biggest in the 1970s when the gay-rights movement exploded. And though it pops into the mainstream from time to time - see RuPaul's Drag Race on television or, just this week, Hollywood actor James Franco in a dress and makeup on the cover of a magazine - the seamier side of the drag-queen scene does not make obvious source material for family musicals.

Moir, 32, got out of doing drag in Sydney bars at the end of his twenties because all the performers he knew in their forties were "alcoholic, drug addicts or suicidal." "It would have killed me," he says. "[ Priscilla] doesn't get into the nitty-gritty."

Playwright Sky Gilbert, whose plays include Drag Queens on Trial (1985) and Drag Queens in Outer Space (1986), argues that the drag queens in pop culture are always sanitized and desexualized - Priscilla, the movie, being a prime example. "It was very entertaining at times, but basically it was a story about touching drag queens who weren't very sexual," he says.

Gilbert says musicals like La Cage aux Folles (which he very much enjoyed in its current Broadway revival) give drag queens the same values as middle-class, heterosexual people, so that audience would go and buy tickets. "The drag queens in my plays were human, but they were sluts and they were third-class citizens," he says. "And that's why they are never produced."

In fact, Priscilla and La Cage aux Folles (and the only tangentially drag-related Billy Elliot, as well) all focus on family values - specifically the relationships between fathers and sons.

Ironically, while Broadway and West End audiences are opening their arms to these family-friendly drag queens, the queer community is not as accepting as it once was. "Basically, the gay community is very anti-drag right now," says Gilbert. "With gay marriage, it's 'to be gay is to be like anybody else.'"

And yet, while drag queens can be seen as outré questioners of norms, in another way, in 2010, they seem like a throwbacks to simpler times. The very idea that a man can "dress up like a woman" is based on reassuring cultural assumptions about the difference between male and female, gay and straight.

"Now because notions of originary biological sex/sexuality and gender categories have been exploded by the trans movement, dressing up as the other is no longer simple because the trans body is new and not as yet representable," says Rosalind Kerr, a University of Alberta professor of theatre who has researched the history of drag, in an e-mail.

Indeed, the really unsettling gender-bending performances today come not from drag queens but transgendered artists who don't deal in clean binaries - playwright/performer Nina Arsenault, for instance, who is touring her show The Silicone Diaries across Canada this year, in which she doesn't shy away from the more confounding questions surrounding being a "chick with a dick."

The Silicone Diaries is decidedly not playing the Princess of Wales Theatre or Broadway. And yet, at the top of the pop charts is Lady Gaga, a woman who has made gender a primary area of performance and who has not done much to discourage the controversy over whether she was a "tranny."

Indeed, in a recent article, The New York Times' theatre critic Ben Brantley wondered, "Has Lady Gaga made drag queens obsolete?" One hopes not, as the cuddlier members of that sisterhood seem to be just what the doctor ordered in these uncertain political and economic times.