With a Virgin Mary strip show, lessons in how to sit on Santa’s lap and a carol about drugs, this festive extravaganza is about as alternative as Christmas can get. Is Britain ready for the New York legend’s show?
If there’s one song that hardly seems Christmassy, it’s The Black Angel’s Death Song by the Velvet Underground. While Lou Reed’s lyrics mention “the cosy brown snow of the east”, it’s the kind you inject rather than go dashing through on a one-horse open sleigh. Nonetheless, it’s the song that kicks off Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce … Booster!, a festive show with a twist. “I wanted to counter the schmaltz of holiday time, so I just thought it would be a nice way to think of angels as, ‘Oh, the black angel of death is coming.’” Mac laughs down the phone from rehearsals. “Christmas is a time when people often kill themselves, so let’s just acknowledge the darkness of this holiday right from the get-go and then maybe in the show we can perform a ritual of why that is and how to find a way out of it.”
Mac identifies as “performer”, uses the pronoun judy, dresses in astounding costumes (designed by cohort Machine Dazzle) and creates shows that are genre-splicing, expectation-defying, carnivalesque and queer. “I don’t like a small show,” judy notes. “I like to make a happening.” Mac’s apotheosis came in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which used the songs of each decade from 1776 to 2016 to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of judy’s native America. Mashing up drag, cabaret, burlesque and performance art, and 24 hours long, it has only been performed in one go once, five years ago in New York, where Mac is based. I was there, awake for 23 hours of it (I kipped through the 1940s), and had the night (and day) of my life.