I love a bit of Christeene. I flagged up her bravura flying visit to London in my round-up of cabaret highlights of 2013, and now she’s back in a big way, hitting Soho Theatre and Duckie’s Gay Shame ahead of a full Edinburgh run. This Q&A for Run-Riot is probably my favourite email interview that […]
This week, the final episode of Drag Queens of London went out on London Live. The climax of the series – an eight-part documentary about drag performers in the capital today – was pegged to the finale of Trannyshack Academy, a talent contest held at iconic Soho cabaret bar Madame Jojo’s. This year’s winner was […]
The five years or so that I’ve spent covering cabaret and other kinds of alternative performance in a sustained way has been a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding experience. A vital part of that has been thinking about why I love these shows. A lot of it has to do (as I’ve recently written elsewhere) with […]
It’s been more than a month since I lasted posted on here. This ends now! Not that I’ve been idle. Over the past month or two, I’ve been keeping BURN‘s monthly residency at Hackney Attic going (that’s the platform for moving-image work by cabaret artists I started in 2010), and doing a one-off mini-BURN […]
Dear me, it’s been way too long since I was on here. I know it’s a cliché about blogs that you start enthusiastically and then let them tail off, and in that respect I seem to have become a cliché pretty quickly. My excuse for such negligence is that I’ve been doing lots of other […]
Get those glad rags out… Tonight sees the launch of this year’s BFI Flare – the new name for the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival – which runs until March 30. I previewed the event for Sight & Sound magazine and you can read my piece below (reprinted with permission). There’s also a round-up […]
Excitement! I’m producing and presenting a new quarterly cabaret night for Chelsea Theatre, starting on April 11! The event link is here. We’ve made a press release so I’m just going to paste it in here and let it speak for itself. Oh, also thanks to Adrian Kinloch for the amazing background photo (which will be […]
Who doesn’t love a makeover? For more than a quarter of a century, it’s been the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival but last year, the British Film Institute decided it was time to change things up and went looking for a new name for the capital’s biggest queer screenfest. The result is BFI Flare […]
Just a little heads up about a couple of pieces I wrote related to Alain Guiraudie’s terrific, unsettling thriller Stranger by the Lake, a naturalistic and intoxicating tale of sex and murder at a French lakeside cruising spot that was released in the UK this weekend. For Sight & Sound, I reviewed it as one […]
Glamour, tragedy, gentleness, fierceness, masc, fem, a leather flogger and a magic wand. Waxie Moon has got it all. Seattle’s favourite “gender-blending queer lady boylesque performance art solo stripping sensation” is a truly phenomenal one-off who can rock a dive bar, classical dance stage or riverbank graveside with the same mix of grace, camp and […]
