The holiday season, it is noted at the beginning of Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce…Pandemic!, is not unlike COVID-19 in some respects. “Both of them ask you to celebrate capitalism,” Mac points out, and “can make you lose your taste.” And lest we forget, “Both of them can make you feel very isolated.”
It was as an antidote to all that that this prolific multihyphenate conceived Holiday Sauce a few years ago, dedicating its world premiere in 2017 to Mother Flawless Sabrina, Mac’s “drag mother,” who died just weeks before the opening. Refigured for this annus horribilis as a virtual variety show, Sauce has retained both its noble spirit and its gloriously garish irreverence. What of taste, you ask? In this program, as in Mac’s oeuvre generally, taste is defined quite differently than it is in the normal world, for as Sabrina put it—Mac’s mamala is quoted frequently here—”Normal is a setting on the dryer.”
[Read Bob Verini’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Pandemic! channels that ethic into a mix of pre-recorded segments—filmed at the Park Avenue Armory, with Mac’s excellent supporting musicians (directed by Matt Ray) dutifully masked and socially distanced—and videos sprinkled through the live portion, which Mac opens with a wry monologue culminating in an a cappella performance of “Another Christmas On Mary,” an original song paying homage to saints and sinners, the famous and the obscure. Mac’s longtime collaborator, set and costume designer and aestheticist extraordinaire Machine Dazzle—who pops up at one point as a self-empowering Christmas tree (“I have beautiful balls…”)—has swathed the star in a Carmen Miranda-on-acid getup festooned with (presumably) artificial flowers, fruits and veggies, with more painted on Mac’s face by makeup designer Anastasia Durasova. (The cherries blossoming on Mac’s upper lip are an inspired touch.)
“O Holy Night” is again deconstructed along lines you never learned in church—after singing, “Fall on your knees,” Mac quips, “That seems self-explanatory”—before Detroit blues goddess Thornetta Davis materializes with a more straightforward, albeit gritty take on the seasonal standard. (Davis is a good Christian, Mac explains, but “fierce.”) Steffanie Christi’an delivers a similarly fervid take on Bill Withers’s “Grandma’s Hands,” which segues into a fancifully illustrated and animated (by Dana Lynn) video for a recording of another Mac original, the giddily and purposefully mortifying “Christmas with Grandma.” (A couple of other recordings are featured, from a recently released Holiday Sauce album.)
The moral of “Hands'”s darkly comic yarn, and the larger message of Sauce, is that we can forge our own families, just as we can define the meaning of Christmas, or whatever holidays and rituals we choose to observe. A live chat in Pandemic! finds Mac dishing with two of the droll performers showcased in a “Queer Nativity”: Glenn Marla, who as the Jewish “Sexual Consent Santa” offers a hearty “Ho Ho Ho in support of sex workers,” and sidhe degreene, who as “Baby Jesus” blames the apostle Paul for the scourge of misogyny.
James Tigger! Ferguson conceived and appears in a psychedelic video accompanying Mac’s muscular rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” as a sort of avenging angel—or fairy, as Mac would likelier have it— “putting the patriarchy to sleep,” as Mac describes it. (Those representing the oppressors include President Trump and a police officer.) And a New Orleans-jazz-flavored reading of “Silent Night” becomes a tribute to the “2020 Queens”—a parade of mostly elder artists, teachers and activists Mac has selected to honor, captured in their home towns and cities donning sashes and crowns.
Pandemic! concludes with a “queer prayer” called “How Can I Keep From Singing,” with traditional music and lyrics by Robert Wadsworth Lowry. Once again, Mac’s thoughts turn to Sabrina. “Sometimes,” Mac muses, “it takes that queen with the magic-marker eyeliner to tell you the truth about yourself.” Part elegy, part satire, Holiday Sauce remains wholly a celebration of such non-material gifts, with all its sweetness and spice intact.
Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce…Pandemic! was streamed December 12, 2020 and will remain online through January 2, 2021. Information and reservations: taylormacholidaysauce.com
