Jinkx Monsoon, the 2013 winner of reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race on which she was crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar, now bears down on Soho superstar status too. Here, with uptight sidekick Major Scales, she has a hefty following, and returns for a festive season on the heels of her acclaimed stint earlier in 2016. Unwrapped gives you almost exactly what you’d expect from a drag queen Christmas show – tinsel, inappropriate Santa jokes, cynicism ceding to the party spirit. But Monsoon – born Jerick Hoffer – brings it to the stage with impressive personality and pizzazz.
She is, it’s made instantly clear, a Christmas sceptic: what else did you expect? The show opens with a contretemps between Monsoon (name and persona inspired by Jennifer Saunders’ Ab Fab role) and dapper pianist Major Scales, who’s struggling to assert a little festive romance and good cheer. Notwithstanding her Father Christmas-inspired ballgown, Jinkx thinks carols are too German, the festive spirit covers a multitude of sins, and gift-giving is fiendishly tricky for gay kids – the subject of one of the show’s songs. Another number launches from the premise that “Santa Claus is an anti-Semite” and builds to the refrain “give the Jew girl toys!”
Most of the evening’s laughs derive from Monsoon’s appetite for affront and indiscretion, whether that’s ribbing Lana Del Rey with a narcoleptic delivery of the song Video Games, or mocking Caitlyn Jenner as an inadequate trans icon.
The highlight, though, finds Monsoon at her least jaundiced, as she addresses how conceptions of gender are changing for the better. Yes, the song that sums this up is a classic nugget of drag queen self-justification. But it’s also generous in spirit and, in its attack on binary notions of gender, delivers an intense hit of lyrical pleasure. “I’m the beauty and the beast, the genie and the lamp / I’m the tramp and the lady – but mainly just the tramp …”
Elsewhere, there’s much that’s standard-issue for drag cabaret. As Monsoon herself admits, catty remarks about her audience are practically in the contract. So, too, ravening ego, cod-misogyny (“I’m not sexist – I just hate women!”), kitsch pop-culture celebration (Jinkx covers Miley Cyrus and Chicago) and third-act exposure of the tart’s no-longer-cynical heart. There’s filler, too, as audience stooges are dragooned on stage for a Christmas Q&A, and repressed wingman Major Scales sings a not wholly convincing number of his own to cover a costume change.
Make no mistake: this Christmas tree would be nothing without its angel on top. Monsoon is the overbearing personality that makes things fly, her old-school gentility prone to dissolve, at a moment’s mood swing, into a throaty masculine bark. Despite the titular hint of revelation, there’s nothing unexpected about Unwrapped. But like Christmas itself, it proves there’s plenty to enjoy in cleaving to well-loved tradition.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 10 December. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
