We are greeted with a snarl of ‘Hello Loverboy!’ and the most villainous cackle of a laugh. We can be speaking with only one person. Fresh from her incredible year on Broadway, it’s Queen of all Queens Jinkx Monsoon. Seconds later we are joined on our Zoom call by the only queen, along with Jinkx, to win Snatch Game twice, the self-eliminator herself BenDeLaCreme.

This legendary duo are with us today to talk about this year’s The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show which kicks off next month and tours across North America through to 30th December. This is the eighth year of the most treasured Christmas tradition which will be travelling across North America, creating safe spaces and bringing cheer to the queer community and their chosen family this Yuletide.

This year promises to be the zaniest show yet with the duo giving us an anthology of stories. An anthology?! DeLa is taking full rein of the writing this year with Jinkx providing additional writing and the two-hour spectacle will even include a Freaky Friday-esque storyline. Jinkx and DeLa tell Loverboy more…

DeLa, Jinkx, I don’t know if you are familiar but here at Loverboy we have a question we ask everyone. Normally it is our final question but today I thought it might be appropriate to start with it. We are named after the biggest selling single of 2001 and always ask what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
DeLa: I feel like because we’re from a Christmas show, we’re sort of obligated to say ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’, but the reality is that we’ve never touched that song, nor would we, because it is way too obvious. ‘Fantasy’ is my favourite one and specifically with the Ol’ Dirty Bastard Interlude.
Jinkx: My favourite Mariah Carey song is when she was in the ocean with that dolphin. She started hitting whistle tones and the dolphin freaked out. Ahaha…

And on a Mariah Carey spectrum of octaves and whistle notes, where would the festivities at a Mariah Carey show be compared to that at a Jinkx and DeLa show?
Jinkx: Well, I think Mariah is up here, you know, singing it in that pitch that old people can’t hear, and we’re kind of like, over here operating a theramin.
DeLa: I will say that when we made the holiday special, it was our first time making a film and it was very rewarding. I was like, ‘Man, we made the campiest, draggiest, craziest, weirdest, most surreal holiday special that’s come out in quite a while.’ Then the Mariah Carey Christmas special came out and holy crap, did it give us a run for our money in terms of surrealist, bizarre but I love it. That made me feel very edified. I was like, ‘We and Mariah Carey, we are one. We share a hive mind.’
Jinkx: I love that video of her on the Peloton in the witch gear going, ‘It’s tiiiiime.’ She becomes Christmas Mariah. She gets it. She knows what she’s doing. And I think we do too.

Absolutely. I wanted to say congratulations on the seven years that you’ve been doing this show. At the beginning you said you created the show as a showcase for your talents but also your team’s. You have both gone on to accomplish so much. I wanted to know about your team behind the scenes too…
DeLa: Oh, well, we have such incredible people that we work with on stage and off. We have an incredible group of dancers, many of whom are people that Jinkx and/or I have worked with for well over 15 years. Ruby Mimosa has gone on to produce her own work. Chloe Albin, our choreographer, is killing it in New York right now. Gus Lanza and Kevin Heard, my co-producers, are working in production on other much larger scales.
We’re really fortunate and grateful that we have this group of people that is so familial. Everyone on the team is as close as Jinkx and I are in many ways, and we all really make an effort to elevate each other.

I love that. I wanted to know what you’ve learned from your Christmas shows that you’ve brought to your new endeavours outside of the show and also what, of course, you’ve brought back to this one.
Jinkx: Well, for seven years I’ve co-written the show with DeLa. This year, I’m providing additional writing, because as you mentioned, my solo career has been a little demanding. But I’ve now worked with people on Broadway who can recognise that I have the ability to think like a director, a producer, a composer and all that is because DeLa and I created something small and intimate eight years ago. DeLa has self-produced this from the beginning and her and her production company had to learn how to grow a production over the years. Watching them rise to that challenge has only helped me understand the bigger picture. I feel like a more valuable actress because I have seen so much of what goes on to make a show happen. Maybe it’s the stars getting the bows and the applause at the end but none of it would have been presented in the way that everyone responds to if it wasn’t for the work of the team. People appreciate that about me because I come from a world where we created it ourselves. That makes us stronger in all of our individual work.

I hear this year you are exploring horror and sci-fi as well. How was that for you both?
DeLa: Well, Jinkx and I are both big horror sci-fi fans, and we’ve actually pulled some of those themes into the show multiple times throughout the years. A few years back we did a really wild Dickensian ghost time travel. A multi-dimensional Christmas Carol multiverse of madness mashup, right? Back to the future, all of it. Then another year we did a show that was very meta in which our show itself was like trapping us and trying to devour us. There were poltergeist vibes in addition to other things.
But every year we come up with really crazy ideas that don’t fit in with what we’re doing or they feel like a smaller concept. So coming into it this year, there was a treasure trove of past scraps that we love, chestnuts we’ve held onto for the perfect moment. So I pitched, like, ‘What if we do a Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone style anthology and for the first time have multiple tales throughout this thing?’ This is the first year that Jinkx and DeLa have to try to put on a show while surviving an anthology where all these crazy circumstances keep happening to them.
Jinkx: But this is year eight, and I like to feel we have put in the work that justifies an anthology show. We’ve done so much material that now the only thing left to do is do an avalanche of material all at once. It’s eight years of writing a brand new show with the exact same source material. When people write new Christmas songs, they’re just covers of the old Christmas songs. No one’s writing new Christmas music that catches on. I can’t think of anything harder.
DeLa: Long story short, we have earned our treehouse of horror episodes. It means we’ve gotten to dip into a lot of fun stuff and really reference both genres hot and heavy, you know? As well as one of the lighter, more teeny bopper versions of these, which Jinkx is particularly passionate about. She’s been pushing for it for many years…
Jinkx: Yeah. We’re finally doing a Freaky Friday motif!

 

Actually I heard there was going to be a body swap situation in this one, and I wondered, if you were to body swap for a day, what mischievous prank would you play on each other?
DeLa: Oh…
Jinkx: She’d checked me into detox! No weed for two weeks. My body would go into shock. Ahaha…
DeLa: All right, that’s mine!
Jinkx: That was my guess. What would I do with your body, since I guessed what you’d do with mine.
DeLa: Oh, my gosh. Ummmm….A lot of public nudity? I don’t know.
Jinkx: I’d go on a bender because technically it wouldn’t be me relapsing.
DeLa: Save me a little liver!

One word that I would associate with this show and in fact one of my favourite words is camp. But I wondered how you felt about the changing of its meaning over the last few years.
DeLa: The definition of camp has always been a moving target. There’s never been one definition of camp that people have agreed upon, right? I think that there’s always a cultural disdain for what we see as low arts, right? Drag vaudeville, burlesque, comedy in general do not win awards.
Jinkx: Horror gets put down on the whole hierarchy.
DeLa: Absolutely. But these are all things that we value and love and I think camp is right there with them. People dismiss it like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t communicate as important an idea’ or whatever. I would argue the opposite because it is the language of a people. Camp is a queer language and we have passed down our history through it. It is actually very important.
Jinkx: Anything stylised is just as serious as dramatic work. You talk to professional comedians and they treat it like a science, you know? I’ve worked with some of the funniest, best actors recently that are people I’ve looked up to since I was a kid, and I got to see their process. They are fucking serious about their comedy. I think the difference between good camp versus bad camp is people who are willing to put the work in and people who think camp is an easy way to just cover something with glitter, right? Using it as a Band-aid.
But DeLa and I have worked really hard through the years to use all of these absurdist vehicles to talk about what’s important to us. I like to say, in short, we talk about serious issues in the stupidest ways possible. If you see past all the jokes, it’s heart in there, you know?
DeLa: Yeah, no matter how crazy we get, there’s always an allegory or a metaphor that we’re really working with. I think the question a lot of people have this year is, ‘How do we keep singing and dancing and finding joy in spite of this constant onslaught?’ We’re not meant to be able to but we’re having to figure out how to. The show feels like we get a solid two hours of escapism and also a little seen, you know?

My last question really was, Jinkx, you had an amazing read for J.K. Rowling recently. She’s not normally one to stay silent and I wondered if there had been any response from her?
Jinkx: She hasn’t texted me, no. I think when you are someone who creates work in the darkness, it means you spend a lot of time looking into the darkness. Through the year I’ve spent a lot of time looking into the darkness. I think maybe that’s why I’ve enjoyed letting other people do the writing for me, because I get to show up for the absurdist circumstances. Not the source of where it all came from, you know? It’s been really fun. I was a pirate, and then I was the first lady. I have found that leaning into doing the best job I can is the best way I can serve my community right now. Then off stage, I’m a trans woman in America. That’s a crazy thing to be right now. Not my choice for it to be a crazy thing. I’ve been saying that they put a target on me, so I turned that target into a spotlight.

The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show tours this November & December across North America 
Tickets & VIP packages onsale now via www.jinkxanddela.com