Charles Busch has become quite the household name in the LGBTQ community over the years but he’s also well known in the theatrical community as well.
Many remember his outrageous drag characters in films like Die Mommie Die, Psycho Beach Party, OZ and Addams Family Values, but he’s also garnered accolades for his non-drag role in A Very Serious Person.
Busch, a graduate of Northwestern University, did what most actors do when they feel they aren’t being cast, he wrote his own shows. He’s written over 30 plays and musicals and shows no signs of slowing down. Two of his most famous shows are the Tony nominated The Tale of the Allergists Wife and the Boy George musical Taboo.
But recently, Busch has taken to the cabaret stage. A stage he graced back in the ‘90s and has been revisiting over the last five years.
“I did some cabaret work in the early ‘90s for a while there,” Busch said. “Then that period ended and I didn’t do it for decades. Then about five years ago I stumbled into it again and got some offers and I thought ‘What the hell’ and began this collaboration with Tom Judson which really made all the difference.”
His act today is very different from what he did back in the ‘90s as he began to realize that he enjoyed the fact that he was getting to sing some really great music with a great arranger and accompanist.
“I was under the impression, back in the ‘90s when I was doing cabaret, that the audiences were coming because they’d seen me in Vampire Lesbians of Sodom or other shows,” Busch admitted. “That they really came to see me be the outrageous funny drag performer, and I thought maybe I could get away with doing one or two sad songs maybe but keep it campy for them because that’s what they want. This time around I thought ‘I’ll just sing whatever songs I think the audience … what will make them feel something,’ I sing mostly ballads but I do a lot of talking, and the act is maybe 35 percent storytelling and 65 percent music … a friend of mine said, ‘Don’t worry… your introductions are the up tunes!’”
Busch will be bringing his cabaret act Lady at the Mic to San Diego for one night only Friday, March 24 thanks to The La Jolla Playhouse. He’ll be performing at the Abbey (2825 Fifth Ave.), along with accompanist and collaborator Judson, to raise funds to support La Jolla Playhouse’s New Play Development program.
This will mark the second time Busch has collaborated with the Playhouse, the first time being the premiere of his show The Third Story which went on to Broadway starring Busch and Kathleen Turner. It was an experience for Busch that he holds near and dear to his heart.
“It was a marvelous thing premiering that play,” Busch admitted. “Just having such enormous resources. The sets and costumes and everything are first rate. The marvelous cast and a lot of care went into it. One of the great things is Chris Ashley, who I’m very fond of, said ‘We’d love for you to do a play’. I had a vague idea of these three stories and weaving them together and he said ‘let’s do it!’ So we developed it and it was a very exciting process to work on. We later moved it to New York. I don’t think I’d have had that experience if it wasn’t for Chris and the La Jolla Playhouse.”
Busch is currently performing around California and he’s been on a small tour of sorts, over the last few weeks. It’s been a little bit tighter of a tour than some of his past tour dates.
“This is the most extensive and wackiest tour we have ever done,” Busch said. “You get what you ask for. In the past we’d do a number of West Coast cities and their was kind of a couple of days in between each stop and you kind of lose all your money, cuz you kind of go out and stay in hotels in between and you lose all your profits and that always kind of bugged me. And so I got what I wished for this time; we booked it literally every night and I have just never had an experience like this where we were in Costa Mesa for three nights and then left the next morning for San Francisco; and we were on stage that night, left the next morning for L.A. and we were on stage that night. It kind of just worked out perfectly and we’re on again tonight in L.A. and then actually I have two days off, then we go to Palm Springs for the weekend, then have a couple of days off, then we go to San Diego to do the fundraiser for The La Jolla Playhouse and then I go home.”
Lady at the Mic is only one of the cabaret shows that Busch is touring at the moment. It’s a show that he and Judson created about a year ago.
“Well, to make the whole thing even more difficult is that we are doing two completely different shows … we’re in cabaret repertory,” Busch added. “There’s this one theme show, this very ambitious theme show we put together a year ago for Jazz at Lincoln Center and it’s called Lady at the Mic. We custom made that and we are doing that at La Jolla Playhouse, but in other cities we are doing our regular cabaret show. For me it is certainly a real achievement of memorization and focus to do an hour to an hour and a half of different material. If I pull this off, I seem to be doing it, I’m gonna have to get a whole new personality cuz I will no longer be able to call myself a hypochondriac. I don’t know what I’m gonna do!”
New personality, or not, Busch is finding that his re-visitation into the world of cabaret is something he is enjoying immensely. Busch has found that he’s quite comfortable being himself on the cabaret stage.
“It’s something I really love,” Busch said. “It’s an interesting thing, my whole career has been playing characters in a play that I write; all these different women with different names, different historical periods, so I’ve never really had a drag persona, like so many of the people you see on RuPaul’s Drag Race. I’m just trying to be as unguarded and honest with the audience as possible. I guess it’s a bit odd that I’m in drag at all because I’m introduced as Charles Busch and then I come out looking like this glamorous lady, then talk as myself and tell stories about my life and my experiences and then sing songs like Sondheim and Marilyn and Alan Bergman. It really makes no sense at all except that I’m so comfortable being in drag after 40 years that I’m able to somehow be myself as well as sort of evoking a great lady of the silver screen. The only difference between my cabaret persona and who I am is really just a question of how I cross my legs, which is very different!”
Don’t miss your chance to see this one-of-a-kind Busch event Lady at the Mic.
Tickets are available at lajollaplayhouse.org/lady-at-the-mic or by calling La Jolla Playhouse at (858) 550-1010.
