How best to describe the experience of seeing Kevin Thornton’s Please Call Me Cupcake? It’s the theatrical equivalent of a juice cleanse. Follow me here. Shortly after you get started, you begin to wonder (then eventually worry), is this it? Is this all I get to tide me over?But time passes and then something happens. You start to appreciate the simplicity of it all. Then you begin to feel better. Next thing you know, you’ve made it all the way through and, instead of dreading it and counting the minutes, you actually are glad you stuck with it and kept an open mind. Dare I say: You’re better for it?Or in the interest of time, we can just say it’s a show about a drag queen playing a drum machine and making really strange music. That works too.Please Call Me Cupcake is really both. It’s a kinky voyage of self-discovery led by the unlikeliest of spirit guides: Cupcake Hawthorne, with the flair of Divine, the sense of humor of Pee-wee Herman and the hair of Dee Snider. As Hawthorne, Thornton owns the stage. Good thing too, because with one flicker of doubt, this show would topple. It’s performance art that requires utter commitment. Thornton delivers.That same can’t be said of Cupcake’s music. After the first couple of tunes, everything starts to sound the same. That goes for the beats, but also the at first-innocent Highlights magazine-style lyrics that take a wicked turn by song’s end. But the music isn’t the charm of the show. It’s really the corn in this corn dog. The inter-song banter with the audience is the meat.Whether she’s flirting with her new friend in the front row, asking the audience to contribute some pizzazz or giving fashion tips, Cupcake is at her best when she’s out from behind the drum machine, directly engaging the crowd.By show’s end, Cupcake admits that she’s let some negativity creep into her set. And she doesn’t want that energy to stick with either the stage or the audience, so she leads everyone in a “make the space great again” affirmation. When she sticks to storytelling and audience banter, the affirmation is unnecessary. This girl’s got sass for days.
This article appears in Jun 1-8, 2016.