Music/Comedy

Trixie Mattel show is likely not a drag

Trixie Mattel
Trixie Mattel

So, Trixie Mattel, stand-up comedian, country singer and glamorous winner of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars 3, what can tonight's audience expect at the Little Rock performance of your Now With Moving Parts Tour?

"The main question people have when they see the show is, why so much nudity? But I just think, well, far be it for me to deprive people of their desires."

Trixie Mattel, Now With Moving Parts Tour

8 p.m. today, Robinson Center Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St., Little Rock

Admission: $41.25, $57.50, $166.50

(501) 244-8800

robinsoncentersecon…

Relax, dear reader. Mattel is joking, something she does often and in her wonderfully dry, Midwestern way during a nearly half-hour telephone interview.

"OK," she says, getting serious about what her solo show entails. "It's 60 percent stand-up, 40 percent music. There are four wig changes, four costume changes, three videos, two different guitars, an autoharp, singing, playing, dancing. I put so much into it that you never know what's happening, and it feels like one big gesture."

Big gestures are nothing new for Mattel, who competed in the seventh season of RuPaul's Drag Race in 2015 before becoming All Stars 3 champion this year. Her Now With Moving Parts Tour gets its name from a track on her latest album, One Stone, a solid collection of tunes that would sound right at home on the Outlaw Country satellite radio station.

"I look like Miss Piggy, but I believe I'm, like, John Denver. Maybe I'm living an illusion," Mattel says with a laugh.

Onstage she uses her songs to fuse with her humor: "I like that with stand-up, I can make people laugh. We can address some deep stuff in a funny way and then we can take these pit stops and have musical moments of honesty."

Mattel, who has appeared on an episode of American Horror Story: Roanoke, is the creation of 28-year-old Brian Michael Firkus, who grew up in rural Wisconsin and went to college in Milwaukee, where he studied music and musical theater. He started dressing in drag when he was 19.

"When you look at Trixie," she says, "you're seeing a person who grew up playing folk music, went to school for musical theater, worked as a makeup artist and went to beauty school. My mom always said that happiness is figuring out what you're good at and finding people to pay you to do it. I love dressing up, I love playing music and I love doing stand-up."

COMEDY

The comedy aspect of her career actually came last, and was the result of having to stall the audience at a Milwaukee drag show when a contestant wasn't ready to perform.

Turns out she was a hit, and started working as a hostess at shows.

"I guess I've always been funny, but you know what's not funny? People who think they're funny," she says.

The juxtaposition of Trixie, a fabricated, almost bigger-than-life character, with folksy country songs and stand-up is what makes her unique.

"People are willing to go on this journey with you," she says. "Whereas, out of drag, I'm a tall white guy with a shaved head. It's not that endearing. I look like a gay Forrest Gump. But as a drag queen, I get to be the butt of the joke and I get to get into deeper stuff. When you're a man dressed as a woman, you're forfeiting your privilege. You also get to hook people and get them to go places with you they might not go otherwise."

Just don't think that Mattel is lining up to be some gay/drag queen role model.

"It's not that serious to me," she says. "I get these interviews where people say 'Oh, you're an inspiration to young, gay people.' I do drag for the same reasons I did it before. Attention and free drinks."

Mattel hosted UNHhhh, an online series with fellow Drag Race alum Katya Zamolodchikova. The pair also starred in The Trixie and Katya Show, a hilariously irreverent variety show on Viceland TV that found the two riffing on pop culture, relationships and everything in between.

"I look crazy, but I end up being the straight man," Mattel says. "Katya is just fantastical insanity, and I'm a little more dry and cutting, but not mean."

Mattel and Zamolodchikova, who left the The Trixie and Katya Show after a relapse into substance abuse, announced last week that they will reunite for new episodes of UNHhhh on the streaming outlet Wow Presents Plus beginning Oct. 17.

LITTLE SISTER

One Stone is the follow-up to Mattel's 2017 album, Two Birds, and opens with "Little Sister," a song written for her then-19-year-old sibling.

"We're from a town with no stoplights," Mattel says, "and I wanted to write something about not getting trapped and going and getting what she wants out of the world."

Awwwww.

"When I played it for her she did not react at all and was totally unimpressed. That's kids these days," Mattel says with a sigh. "Later, though, in interviews, she tells people that when she heard it she cried. That's a lie. She's a liar."

The video for "Break Your Heart," another One Stone track that leans toward pop country, features Mattel in and out of drag and is a sort of homage to '90s videos from someone like Hilary Duff.

"That was about breaking up and not feeling bad about it," she says. "But I was wrong about that, and we've been back together for about two years now."

Tonight's show will be her first time here, she says: "I've never done a solo show in Little Rock, so I'm very excited."

There probably won't be time for sightseeing, though.

She says, "Usually in every city, I get to see the Planet Fitness and whatever Starbucks is closest to the venue."

Style on 10/09/2018

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