The demon bottom of Fleet Street has landed in Washington Square.

Compiled by QV Staff · Edited by Robert Nesti

Every October, the opera queens of New York go looking for a little sin with their Sondheim. They find it at Judson Memorial Church, where Heartbeat Opera has been throwing its annual Drag Opera Extravaganza long enough that the New York Times now calls it “a tradition taking shape.” This year’s offering is Queeney Todd: The Demon Bottom of Fleet Street, and if that subtitle made you snort into your coffee, you are the target audience.

In a review published today, the Times’ Gabrielle Ferrari describes the scene outside Judson as “the girls, gays and theys” lining up “in their finest,” which is about as close as the paper of record gets to yelling “Yaaass” in print. (The audience, for the record, does it for them. Repeatedly.) Her headline: “Lewd, Leering and Reveling in Opera’s Queerness.”

The plot … with apologies to Hugh Wheeler & Christopher Bond

Here’s the setup: Queeney Todd (Nathaniel Sullivan, playing it “with aplomb,” per Ferrari) returns to London after a decade away, out for revenge on the tops who done him wrong, all before he succumbs to the dreaded “twink death.” He falls in with Mrs. Lovedick (Matt Dengler), who isn’t selling meat pies but running a failing sex shop. The Times politely calls her “a lewdly renamed version of Mrs. Lovett.” We have no such scruples.

Along the way Queeney meets a lascivious Rosina (Eliza Bonet, “fearless”) and a parade of errant men, all of them played by mezzo-soprano Imara Miles in what Ferrari calls “a bravado drag-king turn.” An accidental castration turns deadly (as they do), the gang spots a business opportunity (as they would), and then a rival singing barber struts in to wreck the scheme. That would be Figaro, introduced by Jonathan Burke with a striptease and a lip sync. Two barbers, one razor, zero chill.

And just when you think the narrative has run out of places to go, Angela Lansbury shows up. Not the real one, God rest her, but Dengler again, in what the Times describes as “multilayered drag,” hijacking the show and making the whole thing about herself. Very Lansbury of her.

Toxic tenors and a very large razor

Sondheim gets the opening slot, but the evening quickly spins into what Ferrari calls “a feverish mash-up of opera tropes, beloved arias, musical theater callbacks, RuPaul’s Drag Race references, pop music and slapstick comedy.” Over at TheWrap, Robert Hofler counted only three actual Sondheim songs, all with new lyrics, under a review headline that reads “How Dare They Do This to Sondheim.” He’s kidding. Mostly. He also calls the show “hysterically funny” and flags an “inspired send-up” of the “Oh, Mary!” finale, so Cole Escola gets roasted too. Fair is fair.

The musical glue is Dan Schlosberg, Heartbeat’s music director, whose arrangements carry the gags from one genre to the next. There’s Carmen’s “Habanera.” There’s Figaro’s “Largo al factotum.” There’s a montage of “toxic tenor” arias from “Madama Butterfly,” “Carmen” and “Rigoletto,” three operas that could each fill a group chat titled “men are trash.” For the deep-cut crowd, there’s a bit of Offenbach’s “The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.” For everyone else, there’s Ginuwine, Disney, “Swan Lake,” and Shocking Blue’s “Venus,” paired with what the Times describes as “an oversized pink disposable razor.” You can probably picture the rest.

The best bit might be the Handel. “See, the raging flames arise,” from “Joshua,” becomes “See, the raging gays arise,” sung by Queeney while he shaves his entire body ahead of a hot date. There are also projected Grindr conversations that hold some of opera’s worst men to account in the medium they deserve. Don José? Blocked.

The band is four players strong (Ashworth on violin, Schlosberg on keys, Anjali Shinde on flute, Wil Dannenberg on horn), and all of them perform in Victorian drag: corsets, smeared lipstick, sausage-curl wigs.

Drinks at the front, drama on the tables

Part of the fun is that nobody is pretending this is the Met. The bar stays open all show and sells themed cocktails with names like the “Wench 75.” VIP tables sit right up against the stage, holding drinks, folding fans and, eventually, singers, who climb up on top of them mid-aria while the audience snaps photos. Ferrari calls the vibe “less opera house, more cabaret bar,” and the company’s own website encourages patrons to show up in drag, in jeans and a T-shirt, or in Victorian “Old London gutter glamour.” Nobody was turned away for insufficient corsetry.

The Times also clocked a telling moment. When artistic director Jacob Ashworth asked the crowd who was at their first drag show, not a single hand went up. When he asked who was at their first opera, at least a dozen did. That’s a marketing department’s dream inverted: the drag is the familiar part, and the Puccini is the gateway drug. One first-timer told Ferrari over a post-show cocktail, “I’d definitely go see their other shows.” That’s the whole game, folks.

Wait, who are these people?

But who is Heartbeat? Backstory: the company was founded in 2014 by Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, a pair of Yale School of Drama directing grads, with a mission to create “incisive adaptations and revelatory arrangements of classics, reimagining them for the here and now.” Translation: they take the warhorses, cut them down to fighting weight, rescore them for tiny, unexpected ensembles, and drop them into the present. The company is now run by Ashworth as artistic director, Schlosberg as music director and Christian De Gré Cárdenas as executive director, and it has no permanent home, bouncing among Baruch Performing Arts Center, the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn and, every fall, Judson.

The serious work is seriously good. Heartbeat’s “Fidelio” relocated Beethoven’s rescue opera to a contemporary American prison, and the company recorded the Prisoners’ Chorus with more than 100 incarcerated singers from six prison choirs, then wove that recording into the live show. Its 2024 “Eugene Onegin” mapped Tchaikovsky’s own queerness onto his characters. The Times once wrote that Heartbeat “has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies.”

The drag shows go back to the very beginning. The first, “The Fairy Queen,” was staged in 2014 at a Brooklyn bar called the Cotton Candy Machine. Then came “Miss Handel,” “Queens of the Night: Mozart in Space,” “All the World’s a Drag!,” “Dragus Maximus,” “Hot Mama,” “Messy Messiah,” “The Golden Cock” (Rimsky-Korsakov, look it up), “Slaylem: The Witch Trials,” and last year’s “Orgy & Bess: Deep Throats & High Notes.” Somewhere along the way the show graduated from a bar in Brooklyn to National Sawdust, then to Roulette, and finally to the Village. Writer Peregrine Teng Heard has now co-written six of them. This year’s script also comes from Ashworth, Garrett Bell and director-choreographer Kemar Jewel, a ballroom legend whose presence explains a good deal of the strut.

Church, but make it camp

The venue matters. Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South has spent decades as the place where downtown New York went to misbehave in the name of art. It’s where the Judson Dance Theater reinvented modern dance in the 1960s, and where the Judson Poets’ Theater and its minister-composer Al Carmines helped invent the Off-Off-Broadway musical, including Carmines’ “The Faggot” in 1973, a title that would still make a Lincoln Center subscriber faint. A drag-opera revenge fantasy about a bottom with a razor is not a departure for this room. It’s a homecoming.

The bottom line (sorry)

Ferrari’s verdict lands somewhere between a review and a love letter. “Heartbeat’s jokes are so smart, they’re stupid, and so stupid that they boomerang back to smart,” she writes, adding that the whole affair shows “a delight in opera’s inherent silliness and barely concealed queerness.” She also notes that the singing is strong, which is no small feat when half the cast is singing outside its usual range in seven-inch heels.

That’s the real point, isn’t it? Opera has always been a little bit gay, with its trouser roles, its castrati, its divas and the men who worship them. Heartbeat is simply the company willing to say the quiet part at the top of its lungs, with a pink razor in one hand and a Wench 75 in the other.

Queeney Todd: The Demon Bottom of Fleet Street plays Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, through Oct. 31, Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit Heartbeat Opera.

Sources: The New York Times, TheWrap, OperaWire, Heartbeat Opera.

This piece was compiled with AI assistance.