Performance artist Taylor Mac comes to the University of Richmond's Jepson Hall on Dec. 7-8. (Photo by Little Fang Photography)
Taylor Mac’s cabaret performances garner national attention for their fabulous costumes, campy songs and crowd participation. Best known for the award-winning, 24-hour-long musical “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” the California native brings “Holiday Sauce,” a show centered on the most wonderful time of the year, to the University of Richmond. Mac, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama and a MacArthur fellow, prefers “judy” as a gender pronoun and has a good explanation for it. Now in its fourth year, Mac’s “Holiday Sauce” challenges preconceptions about the holiday season through lively renderings of some classic — and not so classic — Christmas songs.
Richmond Magazine: What are the origins of your new show "Holiday Sauce"?
Taylor Mac: [It] started because one of my techniques in dealing with the world, if something is upsetting to me, is I think, "How can I transform that thing?" … Every year, around the holidays, I feel kind of depressed and frustrated because my memories of the holidays as a kid weren’t so nice, also because consumerism and capitalism seem to be taking over everything. I just try to grapple with that and transform what the holidays can mean for me and for the community I live in, and maybe even for the audience. I get to hang out with all the performers and musicians, wear crazy outfits, and that becomes my holiday time.
RM: What else can audience members expect?
Mac: What people will see when they come to ["Holiday Sauce"] is a traditional holiday show but also a wild drag show, and a meditation — one moment it might be crazy camp humor and the next an intellectual pursuit. … They can expect to hear some of the best musicians in New York City, fantastic arrangements by our musical director Matt Ray and wild, wild costumes by Machine Dazzle. They can expect to hear some traditional songs sung not so traditionally, but with love, and they can expect to hear songs they wouldn’t ever expect to associate with the holidays done as holiday songs. I like to think I’m bringing some of the pagan elements back to the holidays.
RM: Where did the gender pronoun “judy” come from?
Mac: It comes from a few different places. My gender is a little ambiguous. When people would introduce me as “he,” it wouldn’t make sense to me … but “she” didn’t really make sense either. So I thought, "Why don’t I just choose something different?" If people judge it, and they usually do, they kind of roll their eyes, but when they roll their eyes, it immediately emasculates them because you can’t roll your eyes and say “judy” without being camp. So there was some activism in it. It also came from how gay men, back before most people were out of the closet, they would refer to their boyfriends in public as “Mary” or “Judy,” so they wouldn’t get homophobic attacks. And then of course Judy Garland.
RM: What are you looking to do in the future?
Mac: I’ve got a new play that’s opening in March in New York City at the Flea Theater. It’s called "The Fre." It’s my first and only of what I would call an “all ages” play … I would say 10 is a good age. It takes place in a ball pit, like at Chuck E. Cheese. The audience gets to throw balls at each other, and it’s so much about our polarization and how we are aggressively separating ourselves from each other. I wanted it to be all ages because I wanted everybody in the room to be able to talk about it.
Taylor Mac’s "Holiday Sauce" comes to the Modlin Center for the Arts on Dec. 7-8 at 7:30 p.m. $10 to $50. modlin.richmond.edu.
