On the evening of her sold-out encore performance of Patti LuPone’s 1993 live album, Charlene Incarnate was cooking risotto. While grating parmesan, she sliced her thumb open. Charlene almost cancelled the show. This was no paper cut. A few drops even spilled onto the silk dress she planned to wear for the second act. She called up her boyfriend, a resourceful New Orleanian, for some DIY medicinal wisdom. His prescription: cayenne pepper on the wound. The pain from the pepper, Charlene said, was worse than what she had felt recovering from any surgery. But it worked. The bleeding stopped, the wound cauterized, and she went to C’mon Everybody to perform ninety minutes of Patti LuPone numbers in full.
Charlene’s show moved through the entirety of LuPone’s seminal Los Angeles concert, from “I Get a Kick Out of You” to “Being Alive” to “Lost in the Stars.” The album is separated into two acts. The first half is various, a collection of assorted standards and favorites of LuPone’s. The second is what LuPone dubs “the theater section,” a chronological overview of songs from most of her stage roles up to that point in her career. Charlene gives both the showtune classics and the deep cuts a texture of her own that transforms them—makes them new. She’s doing Patti, but more importantly, she’s doing Charlene. Charlene’s and LuPone’s features almost seem to rhyme; they even have a similar nose. Charlene lip syncs the songs with every muscle of her face, illuminating the iconoclastic quality of LuPone’s voice. Watching Charlene perform, you can hear the virtuosity, the beveled weirdness, the wonderful particularity of the vocal styling. But what makes her performance so riveting, and so much fun, is how she refuses to ever do a straight Patti LuPone impersonation. Like any great artist, Charlene interprets, she plays the shadow of her influences, tinkering with the original text. She does Patti, then she does Charlene. Unlike Patti, she has yet to be cast in a Broadway production. Even if she never lands a mainstream stage role, her performances are too vivid, too uniquely spirited, too huge in their energy to be contained in the venues she’s given. This show is living proof that Charlene deserves a bigger stage.
A hallmark of Charlene’s drag styling is the fan which she uses to turn her long auburn highlights (no wig needed) into a fluttering crown of drama. During “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” LuPone’s voice grows small, tiny cracks of melodrama spidering through the number as she sings “but all you have to do is look at me to know…” Charlene takes this moment to grow huge with the music and harness her theatrical wind. Her hair becomes an Evita of its own, moving in parallel to the billowing fabric of the dress’s ribbon-like sleeves. LuPone felt that Evita was “the worst experience” of her life. Her role was written by “a man who hates women” [that is to say, Andrew Lloyd Webber]; “she fought like a banshee” with “no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated [her] as an unknown backstage.” An isolating, white-knuckle experience amounted to a show that for her was a demoralizing parade of misogynistic schmaltz. In Charlene’s performance, there isn’t a trace of schmaltz. She gives Patti’s Evita a luminous, vibrational, profoundly feminine incarnation. The furious intensity of Charlene’s energy, the “prism-like cone formation towards the heavens” as she put it in her interview for the Poetry Project Newsletter last autumn, is a divining rod for transmitting pure cunt. Any trace of mawkishness is swept away as soon as she switches on her signature fan.
Drag, at its best, is an alchemical embodiment, a layering of identities made physical and vivid through song. The performer steps inside the music and becomes the moment, gender evaporates as it is emphasized, the two become one. Charlene has always understood the importance of nailing the words to the chosen number in achieving this alchemy. The success of this show is due, in part, to her lip syncing: immaculate, word-perfect, each syllable articulated with her entire body. She knows this album better than anyone, indeed, probably knows Patti better than most queens. At times, the velvet curtain separating Patti and Char dissolves. The intro to “Meadowlark” begins with LuPone poking fun at “the great impresario” producer David Merrick and the fraught 1976 production of The Baker’s Wife. It’s LuPone at cocaine cabaret peak, her banter a perfect pitch of high energy irreverence. The from-the-hip one-liners and quips also feel like they could be coming directly from Charlene. LuPone quips that “there’s a musical theater joke that if Hitler were alive today his punishment should be to send him on the road with a musical in trouble. We were that musical.” A line like this would be at home in Incarnate’s one-woman show, Cuntpany, which she put on at the Parkside Lounge last May. It’s no great leap of the imagination to picture her making a joke like this about her Provincetown residency with her creative partner, Tyler Ashley. If Hitler were alive today, his punishment should be to send him on the road with a drag brunch duo in trouble…
Anyone who’s seen one of her shows, or just talked to her for five minutes, knows Charlene is funny, a dyed-in-the-wool mic queen with a deliciously cynical wit and a switchblade tongue. Her laugh alone is a fixture in New York nightlife, full-throated with the textured huskiness of a career stoner. On stage as Patti, her sense of humor is still fabulously evident. Even beyond the similarity between LuPone’s banter and Charlene’s, there are specific moments where you can almost hear Charlene’s commentary on the number. Her physicality as a performer, her elastic expressiveness, is so finely honed that her voice is audible even when she isn’t saying a word. Note her balanced bodily flutter in “I Get A Kick Out of You” when Patti denies “get[ting] a kick from cocaine,” her literal kick, her knowing wink at the showgoers. You can almost hear her saying, “You faggots get quite a kick from ketamine, that one’s going to the bathroom to do a bump right now.”
During her performance of “Get Here,” she undercuts the earnestness of the song with her own exaggerated irreverence. When Patti croons “you can make it in a big balloon / but you better make it soon,” Incarnate purses her lips and points at the audience, as if to say “I mean you, bitch!” then checks her watch with camp impatience. Her gestures conjure LuPone’s trademark humor with ease, but she’s equally adept at embodying a rich pathos. The humor never comes at the expense of the earned sadness in many of these numbers. For “I Dreamed A Dream,” at the start of the second act, Charlene’s hair is down, her makeup deeper than it was when the show began. She sits in a chair at the center of the stage, the spotlight a full moon framing her from waist up. Her hands lift gently, as if attached to so many invisible delicate strings, as she mouths, “There was a time it all went wrong…” She could just be Fantine, beyond the veil of Patti.
The music moves through Charlene’s body like a fabulous poltergeist beneath the silk. Watching her, I was reminded of a story I heard once of a woman who went to drink from her bathroom faucet during an electrical storm. When she turned on the water, lightning hit her house, ricocheting through the pipes, shooting through the faucet, traveling through her entire body, then exiting through her feet. As the story goes, her slippers were singed, but she was otherwise unharmed. To see Charlene perform is to witness a similar miracle. There is a fierce energetic channeling on display, an almost dangerous feat of divination. But when the lightning leaves the room, Charlene remains unscathed.
Drag is the basic element of her medium, but her performances elevate drag into something new and rarefied. Charlene can perform at C’mon Everybody or Parkside like no one else in the game, but her work is too original, too uniquely oxygenated to stop there. Her 90-minute evocation of a live Patti LuPone show is a feat of drag artistry genius that deserves to be appreciated by a wider audience. It is the product of a singular vision that has every right to flourish on a bigger stage with more copious resources. Productions like Alaska Thunderfuck’s Drag: The Musical prove the culture at large is primed for the kind of drag theater that goes beyond the clubs. Certainly Broadway hasn’t given her a stage, but part of the struggle of LuPone’s career was that she herself was too special—too brassy, too proud, too clocky—for Broadway. She was a star anyway. So is Charlene. She is a vivid performer creating genuine theater from her body alone, and all with cayenne pepper in her wounds.