BEANTOWN ROAST: Urban Improv’s annual "Banned in Boston" benefit regularly attracts all manner of movers and shakers eager to skewer one another senseless in an evening of no-holds-barred skits and satire. And this being an election year, said movers and shakers have big fish to fry. Natalie Jacobson will MC this year’s edition, at which the following bigwigs will serve themselves up for public humiliation: gubernatorial candidates Mitt Romney, Robert Reich, and Steve Grossman; congressmen William Delahunt, Jim McGovern, and Marty Meehan; media mavens Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa, Mike Lynch, Margie Reedy, and Emily Rooney; and business hot-shots Jack Connors, Chad Gifford, Patrick Lyons — among others. That’s May 10 at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street. Tickets are $75 and $150; call (617) 524-7045.
BEANTOWN ROCK: In a race more feverishly contested than the gubernatorial primaries, the annual Rock and Roll Rumble pits the city’s finest unsigned bands against one another for valuable cash, prizes, and — for the ultimate winner — a pox as powerful as Curse of the Bambino. This year’s crop of contenders reflects the downright brilliant state of rock and roll in town — it’s the best we’ve seen in several years. The short list of contestants in Boston’s most storied battle of the bands includes Lost City Angels, the Damn Personals, Milligram, Chauncey, Mishima USA, Crash and Burn, the Gentlemen, Mr. Airplane Man, the Jaded Salingers, Give, Loveless, and Quitter. Preliminary rounds take place May 5 through 7 and May 9 through 11 at the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave in Central Square. Call (617) 864-EAST.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Drag city
Mr. Murray Hill bills himself as "the hardest-working middle-aged man in show business," and perhaps he is. A rotund ball of energy with slicked-back hair, a waxed moustache, and a polyester suit, Hill is a singing, dancing, shticking throwback to the comedic entertainers of yesteryear: the wildly gesticulating vaudeville of Oliver Hardy, the boiling-point hyper-masculinity of Jackie Gleason, the mischievous ribaldry of Benny Hill. But there’s something that separates Mr. Murray Hill from all these men: he’s a woman.
Drag kings — women performing as men — are more marginalized than their male-to-female counterparts, but they’re slowly becoming more visible. And Hill is among the featured performers at a two-day "Drag Down Weekend" next weekend at the Berwick Research Institute in Roxbury. On Friday, the main attraction will be a screening of Third Antenna, a feature-length video document of performance footage from the Northwest drag-king scene. On Saturday, NYC’s Hill will headline a bill of drag-king performers.
"It’s a newer movement," says Truth Serum Productions’ Aliza Shapiro, who organized the festival. "The consumer base for drag queens is mostly men; it’s still more acceptable for men to gawk at queens than for dykes to check out drag kings. It’s interesting, because there are men who call themselves straight going to [the drag-queen bar] Jacque’s, but right now with the kings, it’s still mostly a dyke scene."
Shapiro isn’t just an organizer; she’s also a participant. The nascent local drag-king scene was spawned from a performance at a Gay Pride event several years ago. For a time, drag kings took over a Wednesday-night amateur talent contest at Jacque’s, and two large-ensemble drag-king revues, the Dukes of Dykedom and All the King’s Men, have sprung up. Shapiro’s first performance, a Valentine’s Day gift to her girlfriend, came at a Jacque’s amateur night. "I lip-synched Johnny Cash’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire,’ and I wore wings over a suit coat on a string, so that when I pulled the string, the wings went up like a flame. I won, of course."
Lately, Shapiro’s been honing a mustachio’d alter ego called Haywood Wakefield. "In The Drag King Book, by Judith Halberstam, one of the people she interviews says that women are easier to perform: it’s easier to go over-the-top because there’s more affect to femininity, so there’s more to parody. But how do you make fun of a guy? There’s less to play with, so being a drag king is in many ways harder. With Murray Hill, you get this over-the-top super-duper working-class total sleazeball guy. Haywood Wakefield is a recently divorced guy who works downtown and has a daughter in the audience; he just wants to get up and perform. So the question is, how do I make fun of the guys downtown with their briefcases and business suits? And some other girls are gravitating toward heavy-metal guys and punk-rock cowboys."
Confounding gender stereotypes even further are All the King’s Men, whose performers include not just women as men but butch-identifying dykes "passing" as highly feminine characters. The drag notion of a multiple-character self has found natural allies in such punk-rock groups as Traci + the Plastics, whose frontwoman portrays all her band members via pre-recorded video. The soundtrack for Third Antenna includes music by Traci + the Plastics and 1774, and one of the film’s directors, Freddie Fagula, collaborated with Olympia punks the Need on a recent rock opera titled The Transfused. The concept of drag queens fronting rock bands has become almost mainstream thanks to groups like the Toilet Boys and Hedwig’s Angry Inch. Can drag-king rock be far behind? "Drag kings are still a fringe thing, partly because it’s new and partly because it’s so out there," says Shapiro. "But we’re beginning to change that."
Truth Serum’s "Drag Down Weekend" at the Berwick Research Institute, 14 Palmer Street in Dudley Square, includes a screening of Third Antenna next Friday, April 26, at 8 p.m., and performances by Mr. Murray Hill, the Dukes of Dykedom, All the King’s Men, Haywood Wakefield, and others next Saturday, April 27, at 8 p.m. Visit www.truthserum.org, or call (617) 288-8145.
BY CARLY CARIOLI
