Vulva Va-Voom to Present TRANSMASCULINE CABARET at New York City Fringe Festival

Nationally-touring cabaret artist Vulva Va-Voom (pronouns: they/them/their), who is bi/pansexual and identifies as a transmasculine non-binary, will re-stage their autobiographical show at the New York City Fringe Festival this April. The show premiered last year at Tampa International Fringe, where it won the festival’s “Social Good Award” and a “Venue Choice” Award.

TransMasculine Cabaret is a 60-minute solo piece that interprets the performer’s distressing real-life experiences of queer gender identity through the lens of the persona they’ve played onstage for 18 years. This emotionally intimate script is a stylistic departure for Va-Voom, whose larger-than-life character has mostly been built upon brassy, flippant drag- and burlesque-style obscenity and absurdism. TransMasc retains the provocative underground “NeoVaudeville” elements of earlier shows—frank social critiques, rude sexual jokes, musical numbers, striptease, and absurdist world-building—but weaves them around the artist’s true heartbreaking recollections of growing up in a 1990s agricultural Southern small town, in constant fear of ostracism and violence. 

A recurring motif in the show, Il Pagliacci (a sad, mentally-ill clown), illustrates the ways marginalized individuals lean on unhealthy coping mechanisms—in this case, incessant joke-making—to be accepted by mainstream society. Fun trivia: the performer’s longtime voice professor, Noelle Rogers, played the lead female role in Il Pagliacci opposite Luciano Pavarotti. 

The artist’s website describes Va-Voom as “a ‘legit,’ classically-trained song-and-dance comedian gone bad. Very, very bad.” Their output as a playwright has consistent themes of “high-brow culture meets low-brow humor,” and their most G-rated tagline is, “Picture Frasier and Niles Crane, but they’re drunken, singing, dancing strippers.”

TransMasculine Cabaret includes stand-up bits, guitar, opera, and other elements from the Vaudeville tradition, including a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” parody with re-written lyrics serving as rapid-fire trigger warnings. The show’s narrative flows around a live, onstage “female to male drag” makeup/costuming transition as the performer shares intensely personal mental health struggles, carefully balanced with dark humor.

The production company’s de facto director, C. Aulby Cornette, said this: “Transgender identity is a complex topic to address, especially under the political climate in our home state of Florida. Non-binary people have a difficult time getting others to perceive our identities as ‘valid,’ outside—and even within—our queer communities. Non-binary expression has been a lifelong struggle…but theater is a space that turns tragedy into art. The trick is to do so in a way that is also highly entertaining! Fortunately, our production team has a lot of experience turning dark, depressing sh!t into very funny, edgy comedy.”

Va-Voom’s previous International Fringe Festival honors for scriptwriting/production include one “Social Good” Award, two “Venue Choice,” three “Edge” Awards, two juried winter festival selections at Orlando Fringe, a shared award for community building, and a shared “Best of the Bay” Staff Pick award for “Best D!ck Joke.” (They served as head script writer and—in male makeup—the film actor in their creative partner’s Stroke of Genius: Pantomime Masturbation Throughout Performing Arts History, which is also at NYC Fringe this year.) The 2024 touring season will take Va-Voom’s solo works to Fringes in Asheville, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Myers, and the Twin Cities.

Fringe Festivals began in the mid-twentieth century as a platform for artists whose work does not fit into mainstream venues. The format allows audience members to conveniently choose between several inexpensive short shows in a single outing.
 

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