Drag Queen A Cappella Brings Comedy & Commentary

When it comes to Arts & Entertainment, a writer reaches a point where he or she expects to have seen everything there is to see. It has nothing to do with the shows, rather the writer becomes cocky and self-assured in the knowledge that nothing can surprise him or her.

Of course, then life throws this writer an a cappella show with biting political commentary and he’s just stumped. Oh, and did I mention that they’re all dressed in drag? Well, they’re all dressed in drag!

My journalism classes did not prepare me for this.

The group’s name, Kinsey Sicks, carries an allusion to the highest rank on the Kinsey scale – a six. The Kinsey scale attempts to “develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience” for different portions of a male’s life (kinseyinstitute.org). Kinsey Sicks comes to N.C. State’s Stewart Theater on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 8 p.m. The show, which is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary in December, has a lot of history in the entertainment business, having won for Comedy in the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards and been twice nominated for OUTmusic’s Musician of the Year. It’s not just their vocal talents that have won them acclaim, though. The group is infamous for stirring up campus discussion of issues involving sexuality and gender identity, and this is exactly why they tour college campuses so frequently. In researching I found that when the group had tried to visit Furman University back in late 2007, it had caused a group of students on campus to organize support from various conservative organizations to prevent the Sicks from performing. The results couldn’t have backfired more.

“They didn’t keep us from coming, actually we owed the Kinsey Sicks Committee a debt of gratitude, they couldn’t have done better PR,” Irwin Keller, one of the group’s members, said. “They were all over the news… it was a chance for the campus to have a conversation about censorship, about the role of the University and exposing students to a variety of entertainment, including politically-charged entertainment. … People who believe in free speech were suddenly lobbying for the show regardless of how they felt about the content.”

The show’s charm comes not only from the substance but also the sheer style of the performance. The various members of the group over the years have all donned personalities unique to each performer, such as Keller’s “Winnie,” who is the group’s mothering figure.

Keller said it is easy to have an entirely comedic, alternate identity.

“(Laughs) I wish it were harder, but the truth is no,” Keller said. “It’s so automatic, in part because there’s a lot of ourselves in the characters. We’ve been doing it for so long, there’s a certain ease with which it happens now.”

Keller, who has a law degree from the University of Chicago, made the Sicks his full-time job with the rest of the group in 2002. Its members have experience in law, activist organizations and performance.

Since their job is about political commentary and now that the world of American politics is changing so drastically, Kinsey Sicks must change their content to stay up to date.

“We’re eager and interested to see how the climate has changed, what’s going to be funny,” Keller said. “A lot of what we did was about coming from a place of empowerment, a place of turning the despair into humor, and now we’re entertaining a very different culture. Our show is ‘Wake the F*** Up America!’ It’s a morning news show and what this show allows us to do, instead of making fun of politicians, we’re making fun of and satirizing the media and how it panders, because that’s going to keep happening regardless of the administration.”

Whatever your personal or political views, try something new. Especially when it wears a brightly colored dress and sings high soprano.