‘There was a lot of addiction and pain in my family’: why Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon plays the perfect Judy Garland | Theater

Mef these are strange times in America, it’s very surprising for Jinkx Monsoon, the 38-year-old actress, singer and actress who, after winning RuPaul’s. Pull Competition in 2013 and Drag Race All Stars in 2022, he has become the biggest star. Monsoon, who has the white lead-and-wine glamor of a 1930s movie star, has appeared on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall and in countless viral scenes from Drag Race — and is, in other words, widely known. And yet, he says, when he walks down the street in some American cities, he is in a state of “not knowing if someone will notice me and be happy to see me, or notice something. about I am an enemy. It’s a very interesting dichotomy. ” He laughed out loud. “But it also makes me humble, I must say.”

We’re back at the Soho Theater in Walthamstow, London, where Monsoon is currently appearing in End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s musical play about Judy Garland, set in 1969 in the final months of the icon’s life. It’s a big role for Monsoon, whose impersonation of Garland on Drag Race was spot on drawings still going around (even my money, he Little Edie Beale it was better and funnier). But this game is not played for laughs. Monsoon, who had a huge success as Mama Morton in the Broadway production of Chicago three years ago, leans heavily into the main roles and, like Garland herself, is comfortable with sad humor. “It’s a pillar, and it’s a place,” says Garland, who became fascinated with it after watching Wizard of Oz reruns as a child. And because, he laughs, “my ex loved him a lot”.

Where. We all love her, even though Monsoon knows she’s taking a risk by choosing Garland to model on Drag Race – “an older person for a younger audience”. (He said again Natasha LyonneIn fact, it’s not just Garland that Monsoon evokes in the show, but the entire world of actresses on Ethel Merman-Elaine Stritch to continue, how pain and addiction are related to talent etc., to explain the character of this woman, whom Monsoon calls “complete candour”.

Here’s a famous story that Monsoon likes to narrate, featuring a famous conversation between Garland and Stritch: “Elaine was telling Judy, ‘Judy there’s a new show, it’s called Mame, there’s two women, Vera and Mame. Listen! Vera’s an alcoholic.’ you play Mame on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, and I play Vera and I can drink those nights, but you have to be sober. And then when we flip, I play Mame and you play Vera, and you can drink that at night. So we have to be drunk on all the other shows. And Judy says” – and here, the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up because Monsoon’s look is so good – “’Elaine; what about matinees?’ And Elaine says, ‘Shit!’” (As it happens, It’s Arthur and Angela Lansbury ended up in those roles.)

Monsoon grew up in the early 2000s in Portland, Oregon, in a female-dominated Catholic household. Unusually for that time, his family was open and supportive of what, at the time, was a gender non-conforming boy among them. “My whole family was free.” The women in my life saw what I was when I was young and told the men in my life: ‘You will accept this child or you will not be here.'” He said there were “many interferences, many hurts (in my family), but when it comes to love, then this part is over.”

It still took a long time for Monsoon to become well-known, first in early shows as a teenager in Portland, and later as a disorganized, trans-femme artist with the stage name Jinkx Monsoon (her legal name is Hera Hoffer). On Broadway, he replaced Cole Escola in their Tony-winning show Oh, Mary!, and is close friends with the star of the London run, Mason Alexander Park. It’s very strange, he says, “when you’ve been told all your life that there’s no place for you, that you’ll be lucky if you get anything, to have so much.”

All of which dispels the long-held myth that audiences are invisible to trans or queer actors. Oh Mary! has been the hottest ticket on Broadway since it opened in 2024. Monsoon’s run in Chicago sent the musical’s ticket sales plummeting through the roof, so much so that it returned for a second run the following year. And from the earliest evidence, it looks like End of the Rainbow will repeat that pattern.

“I want people to remember this,” says Monsoon, “the next time someone asks themselves, ‘Shall we remove this person from this death row? Yes. Do it. People would rather see new ideas than the same thing over and over again. All you need to know is that the audience did something. ” He smiles the toothy smile many of us have come to know and love. “Not only that, he loved it, he embraced it, it came to every show.”