When Taylor Mac first set out to produce a holiday show, judy’s heart wasn’t really in it. The holidays didn’t seem all that merry to Mac, a multi-hyphenate drag artist whose impressive catalogue of albums, plays and performance pieces have garnered judy—“judy” being Mac’s gender pronoun—a myriad of awards (including a MacArthur genius grant), international acclaim and an undisputed place among contemporary queer icons.
Mac was fresh off what might be judy’s magnum opus: A 24-Decade History of Popular Music—an enormous, possibly unprecedented theatrical feat that saw judy sketch the history of the United States from 1776 (when the Declaration of Independence was first thrust into the political geosphere) to 2016 (when you-know-who was elected to be the 45th you-know-what). Each decade was allotted an hour of performance time, which added up to a staggering 24 hours, most of which consisted of Mac belting out iconic songs drawn from four separate centuries. It was an exhausting, unyielding masterpiece—one that snagged Mac a Pulitzer nomination in the drama category.
Following that, Mac naturally thought it was time to produce a holiday show. But inspiration, even to a MacArthur genius, can be ephemeral. “I was kind of dispassionate about it,” Mac tells Xtra. “Why am I doing this?” A creative haze persisted for judy until, suddenly, tragedy struck.
In November 2017, just over a month before Christmas, Mother Flawless Sabrina, a celebrated drag queen and queer rights activist who came to mainstream prominence through the 1968 documentary film The Queen, died. She was 78. Sabrina was Mac’s drag mother and close friend, and her passing marked a turning point in Mac’s life—and in the development of judy’s holiday show.
“It all just suddenly clicked,” Mac says. “I’ll make a holiday show, but it will be a show that’s celebrating Mother Flawless.”
From there, Holiday Sauce, a cabaret extravaganza that Mac has performed annually since 2017, was born. The show has morphed and evolved since its inception, expanding into a performance that seeks to highlight American cabaret’s best and brightest instead of focusing solely on Mac’s own talents. This year, the show has been aptly and enthusiastically retitled to Holiday Sauce… Pandemic!, and will be livestreamed by Toronto-based queer theatre Buddies in Bad Times and TOLive on Dec. 12. (Toronto theatre artist Ryan G. Hinds will host a virtual afterparty following the performance.)
Accompanying the show this year is a Holiday Sauce album, a work as eclectic and contagiously queer as anything Mac has made thus far. It operates both as a self-contained holiday record and a reverential nod to queeroes past and present—there’s a Frank Ocean cover (“Super Rich Kids”) and two Velvet Underground cuts (“All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Black Angel’s Death Song”), the latter of which are spliced with holiday staples “Little Drummer Boy” and “Carol of the Bells,” respectively.
According to Mac, everything about the show is a loving homage to Sabrina. The Velvet Underground & Nico, the album from which Mac’s Velvet Underground covers are taken, was co-ordinated and produced by Andy Warhol, who made the record’s iconic “Peel Slowly and See” banana cover. Warhol was a peer of Sabrina’s, and he judged the climactic drag competition in The Queen. The inclusion of those songs is a loving nod to Sabrina, says Mac, and her memory is the driving force behind the show.
Incorporating pop culture into experimental art has always been Mac’s modus operandi. That’s probably best exemplified by A 24-Decade History, but is also true of works like Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, a sardonic follow-up to the famously gory Shakespeare play that yielded Mac seven Tony nominations. Pop culture figures, like Shakespeare and Lou Reed, may be fun to play with, but they serve a more democratic purpose for Mac.
“Pop culture—pop music, specifically—is one of the great art forms that uses imperfection as a way to bring people together,” Mac says. “It’s never really reaching for the hem of God. It’s saying, ‘Here are some simple chords, here’s some imperfect rhyme. I’m offering this up as a gift so that everyone will sing together.’ The real art is how the world responds to it.”
“Pop culture—pop music, specifically—is one of the great art forms that uses imperfection as a way to bring people together.”
Mac’s ingenuity on the album stretches beyond judy’s interpretations of pre-existing fare; an original song, “Christmas with Grandma,” most closely represents judy’s aim with Holiday Sauce. The track has Mac, accompanied by a ukulele and a live audience, telling stories about visiting judy’s grandparents at Christmas over the years. As the song unfurls, so does Mac’s queerness—Mac comes of age (and comes out) over the course of the track, going from a sleeping child in a mother’s arms to a gay teen who has found themselves exiled from holiday celebrations because of homophobic relatives. But as the song fades away, all hope is not lost; Mac spends the holidays with chosen family, happier and safer there than at any of grandma’s Christmases.
Mac’s chosen family has included Sabrina since 2002, when the two first met. Sabrina, who had been a long-time fixture in the New York nightlife scene, had disappeared for “a decade or two” but had recently re-emerged. The apex of the AIDS crisis—which Sabrina witnessed first-hand—was beginning to recede, and the queer youth of the Big Apple were fumbling around in the dark, left without guidance after a generation of elders were lost to the disease. “We were desperate for some kind of mentorship from somebody from the generation before,” says Mac. “She was there with open arms.”
Sabrina may have passed, but Mac has taken up her torch with pride. Judy’s show might be an ode to Sabrina, but it is also a continuation of her legacy—a fierce celebration of life and queerness, always with one eye cast back to New York. Where Christmas was once a dreaded time when Mac could expect sideways glances from grandma, it’s now a time when Holiday Sauce performances come around, and memories of Sabrina can thrive. “It’s changed my whole feeling about December,” Mac says giddily, chortling over the phone. “I get to see friends who I made the show with, we get to think about Mother Flawless Sabrina and we get to live in a world that’s healing instead of harmful. It makes the holiday season fun instead of a burden.”
Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce… Pandemic! streams live on Dec. 12 and is available on demand until Jan. 2.
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