A friend of ours mentioned that he had been given tickets to see this ASC production of The Tempest. “I was expecting it to be somber—but it wasn’t,” he said. No, it was Juno, Circe, and Iris appearing as drag queens, hip-undulating, “ah-ooooooh”-singing, boa-swishing drag queens. Even though two of them wore beards they looked mighty fine, too, I must admit. Oh, and they did use Shakespeare’s verse, set to original music played on the guitar by Arial.

I’ll leave for a future commentary why people have come to expect Shakespeare’s comedies to be “somber.” For now, I’ll just address why drag queens performed the lovers' pageant in this Tempest. Well, actually, I really can't address that other than to say the audience was howling in laughter. It was one of a couple of over-the-top comic moments juxtaposed against keen textual insights and some of the best verse-speaking you’ll hear anywhere.

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