What This Northwest ‘Drag Race’ Alum Has Planned for Her Seattle Tour Stop

When fan-favorite “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Bosco announced the tour dates for her cheeky new show, “The Marvelous Miss Gender,” earlier this spring, Northwest fans noticed that one city was conspicuously absent from the schedule. Why, they demanded, wasn’t this Seattle-based queen bringing the production to her adopted hometown?

“The original thought that was going on with having Seattle on the tour routing was that there was concern that I was, like, overfishing my own market, essentially,” the drag performer explained over the phone last week from Chicago. “(Organizers) were kind of just, like, ‘Well, you already have shows that you do there — are people going to want to come and see you for a solo show when you do these ensemble shows?’”

Bosco — who co-wrote, co-produced, directed, and stars in the new production — was confident that, yes, people would turn out. But since it wasn’t her money to risk, she said, she acquiesced. As the tour went on, though, the decision didn’t sit right with her. “I felt in my gut: ‘This is a show that I wrote for drag queens and trans people primarily, but also for Seattle,’” she said, adding later, “The idea of playing a show all over the country, getting this fabulous response, and seeing my name on all these venues but not seeing my name on a venue at my own home just felt so gross. So eventually, I just kept on whining until they listened to me.”

The Seattle stop for “The Marvelous Miss Gender” — a genre-blending, lip-synced jukebox musical that pokes fun at, among other things, alarmist rhetoric around drag performers and the trans community — is now functioning like a grand finale of sorts for the national, 33-date tour. Happening at The Moore Theatre, the Aug. 21 show will additionally feature exclusive-to-Seattle opening performances from Jane Don’t (who herself had a challenge-win-heavy stint on the most recent season of “Drag Race”) and a group performance from area queens Cali Colby, Rowan Ruthless, and Moscato Sky. The latter notably co-choreographed one of “Miss Gender”’s numbers, which Bosco called one of the most special she’s ever done.

“Yes, we’re in a theatrical setting; yes it’s a production; yes, we’re doing a narrative,” Bosco said when asked about the show’s supporting acts. “But my first and foremost love is drag … . I want this to feel like home. I’ve been away from Seattle for about two months now, and I’m really just excited to feel at home with my people, my community, in a space, sharing something that I worked really hard on.”

Bosco was also on the road when she started coming up with the ideas that eventually coalesced into “The Marvelous Miss Gender.” She was on a plane, heading home from London. She was profoundly hungover. For her in-flight entertainment, she marathoned the 1990s “Batman” trilogy. While a fan of them all — she effused over the bodycon latex suit Michelle Pfeiffer wears, as Catwoman, in 1992’s “Batman Returns” as “the best superhero costume of all time” — she was particularly smitten with Joel Schumacher’s camptastic “Batman Forever” (1995) and “Batman & Robin” (1997). Both movies were critically panned upon release but have since been embraced by queer audiences for their tongue-in-cheek humor and candy-colored sets and outfits. “I’m like, ‘You know what? There’s something there,’” she recalled. “What if I made a really, really trans version of the Batman story, but we did it from the point of view of the villain?”

The story continued developing with fitful additions to her Notes app — a place Bosco characterized as an “ever-replenishing resource in my life” that’s always being freshly stocked with jokes and general material — until she felt like she had enough for a whole production. She was hesitant to discuss “Miss Gender”’s plot in too much detail to avoid undercutting an element of surprise, but she joked that those walking in cold should “buckle up.” “I think it’s pretty easily understood for everyone to find it entertaining,” she said. “Like, it’s very funny; it’s very dumb; it’s very campy. There’s a lot of layers to dig into if you feel like doing that, but at the end of the day, I don’t think having a message of being clever works very well without being entertaining first.”

There is, she said, a lot of spectacle: giant martini glasses, show-stopping dance numbers, one-after-the-other costume changes. Inspired by Eartha Kitt’s R-rolling take on Catwoman and liberal with an evil cackle raspified by years of smoking, the titular supervillain character Bosco plays shares some of her drag persona’s DNA: she cracked that Bosco began as more, for lack of a better word, “satanic” until that started feeling creatively hindering. (Her drag, as it appeared on the 14th season of “Drag Race” and the 10th season of its spin-off series, “All Stars,” won over fans and the show’s judges alike for its stylish, irreverent melding of old Hollywood and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark-ified horror aesthetics.) “It’s kind of everything I had in the tank at the moment thrown against the wall, and seeing what stuck,” she said, “and most of it did.”

All of it lip-synced, most of the music encompasses 1980s hits from the likes of Teena Marie, Diana Ross, and Whitney Houston. Bosco was careful about selecting songs that simultaneously made sense for the show’s storyline and wouldn’t get old for her after performing them 34 times in a row. All of the music’s underscoring was done by Jordan Olds, who’s one of several local creatives Bosco brought into the show’s fold. (Another is James Jeffers, who’s responsible for all the tour’s hand-painted backdrops.) Everything feeling handmade was important to Bosco, who’s made it a point, in promotional materials, to disclaim that everything in “Miss Gender” has gone untouched by AI.

“From a moral standpoint, I think AI is just bad,” she said. “It’s bad for the environment; it’s bad for art; it’s bad for the future of us creating things as humans. From an aesthetic point of view, I just think it’s cheap and tacky, and I hate it … It meant a lot to me to make sure that there was no AI going into this, and I think it shows. There’s so much love in every single piece of this.”

With the tour soon coming to a close, Bosco said that segueing into more traditional stage productions in the future has crossed her mind. “Part of what I love about drag is being able to create for my own skill set and highlight myself the way I would like to be highlighted,” she said. “I love writing, so what I’m doing here is kind of the dream that I would like to be able to do for as long as possible — to write parts for myself, to live in a world that I’m creating. But I have been thinking a lot about this year about potentially going out and auditioning for a few things and seeing if there’s roles that would fit what I do that maybe are a little bit more serious.”

What’s certain, though, is that, once the tour is done, she’ll spend more time digging into her “Magic: The Gathering”-focused YouTube channel, “Spell Slayers,” with fellow Seattle queen Irene the Alien, alongside whom she competed on “All Stars.” And even though she doesn’t want to mount another one for at least a year, she’s already thinking about a follow-up to “Miss Gender” — perhaps one in which the eponymous character is a James Bond-style spy. “But,” she said, “that’s definitely way out in the future.”

Get tickets for “The Marvelous Miss Gender” here.