(Photo by Eric Paguio)
When BenDeLaCreme bounced into season six of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in 2014, viewers knew she was a star. They voted her Miss Congeniality after her fifth-place finish to prove it.
The performer subsequently returned four years later for season three of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” racking up more wins than any previous competitor. She was widely seen as a frontrunner until placing sixth.
That’s because in true sweet-as-pie, sharp-as-cheddar fashion, DeLa eliminated herself rather than another queen. “It was really powerful … you never feel like you’re in control because someone else is running the show,” she shared afterwards. “It was amazing to feel fully in control of my own path.”
It’s a feeling she’s cultivated through BenDeLaCreme Presents ever since. The entertainer’s production company exists to break new ground by and for drag artists.
Productions have included “To Jesus, Thanks for Everything – Jinkx and DeLa,” co-created with frequent collaborator and “Drag Race” season five winner Jinkx Monsoon, and their “All I Want for Christmas is Attention.”
The duo’s sold-out tours were followed by the film “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Special,” which drew widespread acclaim on Hulu.
Now, the global superstar has embarked on her biggest solo tour yet. Her one-queen extravaganza “BenDeLaCreme is… Ready To Be Committed” promises a hilarious and heartfelt spectacular that blends burlesque, comedy, original music and magnificent mayhem.
Originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed due to the pandemic, the show “is a hilarious and heartfelt spectacular that blends burlesque, comedy and original music with her signature terminally delightful charm.” It was written, directed and produced by the star and launched its international tour April 13.
The entertainer will perform at The Plaza Live in Orlando on May 21. Watermark spoke with DeLa about “Drag Race,” reconnecting with audiences around the world and more.
WATERMARK: If there’s such a thing as post-“rupaul’s Drag Race,” where does bendelecreme find herself as an artist and entertainer today?
BenDeLaCreme: Excited to finally head to Orlando with a solo show! I premiered this particular show back in 2019, I did a run of it in New York and in Provincetown.
It was supposed to tour everywhere else at the beginning of 2020 and of course that fell apart and we had to keep delaying it.
How does it feel to bring it back to the stage?
Finally getting to bring this show out into the world is very exciting to me, because obviously I have been hungry to be back on the road with audiences. This is a show I’m really proud of and it’s also nice when you have a little while to sit with something that you created. It’s been two and a half years and I’m still excited to look at the show and bring it out to share with people.
This is a bigger tour now than it was ever going to be and we’ve gotten to book even more cities. It’s become my biggest solo tour to date and I’m just super happy to be back on the road.
Has anything surprised you about getting back out there?
When Jinkx and I toured our holiday show before we got shut down, I knew that I had missed performing. In two years of quarantine, I produced a film, I did a lot of streaming work and kept busy with stuff online, but it was a hard couple of years.
It was easy to sort of have my doubts about why I am doing all this. Getting to be back on stage in front of an audience – I wasn’t surprised by how rewarding it was, because I know that I am a live performer at heart and that’s why I’ve always done what I do – but I cannot even express the enormity of how incredible it’s felt to be back in front of an audience.
It was like any doubts I was having about what I’m doing all instantly vanished.
How did you conceptualize the show?
I wrote it back in 2019 as my first solo show dealing with idea of romance, relationships and kind of her quest for love. She decides she’s going to get married at the beginning of this – this is going to be her wedding and she has to scramble to do all of that in 70 minutes – so it’s really fun and kind of whacky.
It’s a comedic, campy exploration of love and relationships, all told through song, comedy, puppetry and burlesque. I play 11 different characters and there’s a lot going on.
Has the story changed at all from the original version?
I’ve gotten the chance to expand on some of the visual spectacle of it with the extra time, but the script hasn’t changed much.
If anything, we revisited things after all of us have been through this collective trauma to see if this story really holds up – if these ideas don’t feel important anymore with what we’ve been through – and I think it does.
This show is about being connected with other people, grappling with being alone and dealing with what it is to truly be intimate with someone. To commit to someone. To feel connection. It comes at it from all angles and it’s not just a show for single people or for people who are in relationships, it’s a show for everybody. After what we’ve all been through it all feels more immediate.
How so?
We’ve all had to sit so much with being isolated, maybe trapped in a small space with other people. We’ve had to navigate how intense it is to just be with someone, with all of the good and bad that comes with it. Or maybe we’ve been separated from people we love. There’s a lot that’s been heightened in regard to aloneness and relationships, so I think unexpectedly to me this show actually feels even more pertinent and richer.
In general, we have all been more starved for connection than we have even allowed ourselves to realize. I think it’s a survival tactic where we could not allow ourselves to know.
So I’m still looking forward to getting to connect with people and share myself with them every night. It’s by no means a surprise, and it sounds very trite, but it has been staggering to me how big the feeling is being back out there.
You’re back out there through BenDeLaCreme Presents. What led you to create your own production company and what is that like?
In the world of drag, there’s now such a thing as a drag industry and we can become a little plug and play. When you really have a clear vision of the artwork you want to put out into the world and how you want it to land in terms of the artistic content – and also how you want it marketed, where you want to bring it, how you want to staff it, all of it – it was important because I really feel passionate about every angle of that.
I’ve been writing, producing and directing shows for a long time now, well before “Drag Race,” but officially started my own production company in 2017. I love being a queer production company making queer work by and for queer people. Of course, straight people can come too. [Laughs.] We do have a wonderful straight audience who really appreciates the work.
That’s been a rewarding thing for me as drag becomes more of an industry. I think it can be easy to get absorbed into the business of it, but I love drag in all of its kind of original, flagrant, system-bucking energy and I am very much like a proud carrier of that torch.
I love that if you come to see this thing you know that my hands are in every single aspect of it, from everything you use on stage to who’s working in the room to the VIP guest badge that you got when you walked in the door to preshow music to marketing you saw online. It’s all part of it and something very curated.
What else can audiences expect from this show?
I think that if you’ve seen any of my live performances, it’s very much the next step of the canon of BenDeLaCreme’s work. If you haven’t, you probably cannot be prepared.
I make work that is really borne out of a fun, campy, cabaret, variety world, so you get all of the things you expect from a drag show in terms of song and dance. There’s original music and comedy and as I said, I do puppetry and this wide range of things. But it’s also narrative.
I’m taking the audience on a journey and I work hard to make sure everything is both funny and has a lot of heart and meaning.
In this show people are going to meet a whole slew of bizarre characters who are going to make them laugh and think, but we’re also going to go to some unexpected places. So far it’s been really incredible seeing audiences respond to this show and I’m excited to continue that experience with them.
“BenDeLaCreme is… Ready to be Committed” plays at The Plaza Live May 21 at 8 p.m., located at 425 N. Bumby Ave. in Orlando. Tickets begin at $44.50.
For more information about the show and BenDeLeCreme’s work, visit PlazaLiveOrlando.org and BenDeLaCreme.com.
