Theater program notes: Les Misérables

Published December 4, 2018, for the Broadway national tour of Les Misérables at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

Europe and America in the time of Les Misérables:
Hearing the people sing beyond the world of Jean Valjean
By Jake Stigers

Quick: When in history did the events of Les Misérables happen?

The farther we get away from the past, the easier it can be for us to file stories about—for instance—the Black Plague, Michelangelo, Les Misérables, the Civil War or the Titanic into a singular Olden Times mental folder and not fully understand any larger historical context that might shape or define our understanding of those events.

(Before you reach for your phones to google all that: The Black Plague wiped out up to 60% of Europe’s total population around 1350. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was one of the defining artists of the Italian Renaissance in the early 1500s. We’ll get to Les Misérables in a minute, but for the sake of this rough timeline remember that it took place in France in the early 1800s. The American Civil War prevented the Confederate southern states from seceding over the issue of slavery when it ended in 1865. And the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage between Southampton and New York City just over 100 years ago in 1912.)

For the masterful way the musical Les Misérables telescopes the events and the settings of the book Les Misérables into 49 songs in two sung-through acts, an understanding of a more global context can meaningfully enhance any appreciation of it—if for no other reason than to triangulate it into the broader timeline of history.

It’s understandably impossible to cover every aspect of the history and culture surrounding the protagonist Jean Valjean’s journey through Les Misérables, and this essay in no way tries to do so. Instead, it touches on a range of events from the epic to the merely interesting that can hopefully offer useful context for understanding the world in which Les Misérables unfolds:


1796: Preamble: Jean Valjean is sentenced to prison in the Bagne of Toulon

Nineteen years before the story of Les Misérables begins, the peasant Jean Valjean is sentenced as prisoner number 24601 to serve time in the notorious Bagne of Toulon for stealing bread to feed his starving sister. During his almost two decades of incarceration, France and the entire Western Hemisphere undergo a chain reaction of revolutions and wars that radically alter the course of modern global history. But first, let’s back up a bit more ...

Just three years before Valjean entered prison, the former King Louis XVI of France and his wife Marie Antoinette were convicted of high treason and guillotined at the Place de la Révolution in Paris as a thousand-plus years of French monarchy fell and the French Revolution began. The ensuing French Revolutionary Wars raged from 1792 to 1802, first pitting the French Republic against monarchies in Europe and then spreading as far as Egypt and North America. Their end segued almost directly into the era of Napoleonic Wars that carried over unresolved disputes between Napoleon’s French Empire and a fluctuating array of European coalitions. A total of seven wars in all, they ended when the European Allies finally defeated Napoleon in the one-day Battle of Waterloo near what is now Belgium in 1815.

Aside from the expected cataclysmic destruction wrought by two decades of prolonged combat, these wars also brought explosive revolutions in European social structures, redefined international borders and relationships, and radically transformed the ways future wars would be strategized and fought to this day.

Partly to fund his eponymous wars, Napoleon Bonaparte sold France’s Louisiana Territory in North America to President Thomas Jefferson of the fledgling United States in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase, as the acquisition of this territory came to be called, stretched from present-day Louisiana to what is now Montana on land that would eventually be partitioned into 15 states—including Iowa—and parts of two Canadian provinces. It more than doubled the existing square mileage of the United States and fueled what our growing country would declare to be our Manifest Destiny: a continued and often ruthless expansion all the way west across the continent to the Pacific Ocean that involved annexing and conquering land from Mexico, Britain and the continent’s Native Americans.

Back in Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven composed his now-iconic dum-dum-dum-DUMMM Symphony No. 5 in 1808 that would help define a burgeoning era of Romanticism in music, art and literature. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—the quintessential composer of the Classical period in music—had died seventeen years earlier, at the early pre-dawn of this new Romantic period that would begin to shape almost a century of culture in both Europe and America. Romanticism was a bold new paradigm that shed the Classical era’s emphasis on structure and melody in favor of exploring emotion, imagination and the free expression of feeling—all of which spilled over into the worlds of art and literature. Case in point: Les Misérables and Valjean’s operatic journey through morality, love, sacrifice, penance and ultimately grace.

Here are a few more interesting milestones that Jean Valjean missed during his incarceration: After observing that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, Edward Jenner introduced the first successful smallpox vaccine—actually the first ever vaccine—in England in 1796. French soldiers fighting under Napoleon in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria discovered the Rosetta Stone—a decree from Egypt’s 300 BC Ptolemaic dynasty that was inscribed in three languages and unlocked the mysteries of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs—in 1799. The Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to become the United Kingdom in 1801. The world population officially reached one billion people in 1804. And the Industrial Revolution hit its peak, radically transforming the way we produced everything from textiles to energy to physical and social infrastructure.

So the narrative of Les Misérables opens in a radically new world from the one Jean Valjean knew when his theft of a loaf of bread landed him in prison 19 years earlier. And, as worlds have a way of doing, his just keeps changing ...


1815: Jean Valjean is released from the Bagne of Toulon

Valjean is released and left homeless in the commune-city of Digne-les-Bains in the early years of France’s Bourbon Restoration, a new constitutional monarchy set in place after the fall of Napoleon. Under the new King Louis XVIII, France restored relationships with longtime allies, centralized its government in Paris and moved forward with relative stability under a Revolution-inspired motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Across the pond, the War of 1812 had ended and America was experiencing what is still called the Era of Good Feelings marked by a decline in partisan politics and a sense of nationalist identity thanks to a series of Supreme Court opinions supporting a more centralized government here. A year earlier, a lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key saw the American flag flying over Fort McHenry after an all-night bombardment by British forces near the end of the war. The sight inspired him to write “Defence of Fort M'Henry,” a poem that soon became the lyrics to our National Anthem: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Three years after Valjean’s release, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley published, initially anonymously, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in England. This gothic novel is considered to be the first work of modern science fiction for its premise that employs a deliberate use of science and technology to create a creature of fantasy and imagination. Not to be outdone in the genre of gothic literature, American author Washington Irving killed off—or did he?—poor Ichabod Crane after a terrifying encounter with the Headless Horseman in his 1820 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

And in a slight detour from this essay’s stated narrative about Europe and America in the time of Les Misérables, it’s interesting to note that in January of 1820, German explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Russian explorer Mikhail Lazarev were the first to see and officially discover Antarctica.


1823: John Valjean, under the alias Monsieur Madeleine, is now a wealthy factory owner and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer

France’s Bourbon Restoration period lasted until the 1830-32 uprisings depicted later in Les Misérables, but by 1823 the constitutional monarchy had been slowly disassembled by hard-right ultra-royalists, and with the rise of King Charles X in 1824 it lurched even farther right with severe restrictions on the press and a campaign to compensate the families of nobles whose property had been taken during the Revolution.

Here in America, we’d carved the state of Missouri out of the Louisiana Purchase territory in 1821, bringing our state count—and the number of stars on our growing flag—to 24. To assert our independence and declare our neutrality in any future European conflicts, President James Monroe introduced the Monroe Doctrine in his 1823 State of the Union address, declaring that any European attempt to re-colonize the Americas would be considered a hostile act toward the United States. And three years later on July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the approval of our Declaration of Independence—both former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died.

To modern historians, the Classical era in music had officially ended by 1820, leaving Romanticism as the dominant voice in Western music, art and literature. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Symphony No. 9 in 1824 thunderously marked the occasion, as did many iconic works of art, including Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People), which depicted the goddess Liberty bearing the flag of France in its brilliant red and blue as she guides the triumphant citizenry forward over the pro-royalist bodies who fell in the victorious July Revolution of 1830.

1823 ended on a visions-of-sugar-plums note with the anonymous publication of A Visit from St. Nicholas (later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore), which introduced America to the Santa Claus we celebrate to this day with his like-a-cherry nose and bowl-full-of-jelly laugh.


1832: The Paris June Rebellion

The June Rebellion—also called the Paris Uprising—depicted in Les Misérables was an actual historical event. The last of a two-year series of violent anti-monarchist outbreaks in Paris, this battle was inspired by the cholera death of French Parliamentarian Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a popular anti-royalist and champion of the poor. The uprising lasted only two days: June 5-6, 1832.

The song “The ABC Café - Red and Black” that student revolutionaries Marius and Enjrolas sing in Les Misérables to stir the passions of their fellow students into battle has a coincidental—albeit not specific—relationship to the French novel The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir) that had been published two years earlier by Stendhal (a pen name of French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle). While the Red and the Black in the Les Misérables uprising represent “the blood of angry men” fighting on behalf of the poor who have been long oppressed by “the dark of ages past,” the novel tells the story of a poor man’s ultimately futile attempts to rise above his station in life through hard work, talent, and eventually deception and hypocrisy.

Speaking of revolutionary insurrections, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (he used this name to distinguish himself from a number of similarly named relatives), the longest-lived and last surviving signatory of America’s Declaration of Independence, died on November 14 of 1832, 56 years after the document was signed. He was 95.

But the revolutions of the era weren’t tied entirely to politics. The British sloop HMS Beagle had set sail a year before the rebellion on a five-year expedition to chart the coasts of South America, and it carried as a passenger a young English biologist named Charles Darwin. Darwin published The Voyage of the Beagle in 1839 as both a travel memoir and a scientific journal documenting the discoveries in biology, geology and anthropology he made on the trip. These discoveries inspired additional expeditions and research that supported his theories of evolutionary biology that he eventually published in his 1859 On the Origins of the Species.


1833: Marius and Cosette make their final reconciliation with Valjean

The French Charter of 1830 had overthrown the conservative government of King Charles X and signaled the beginning of the 18-year July Monarchy, where the ascending Louis Philippe conspicuously proclaimed himself Roi des Français (“King of the French”) instead of the imperialistic “King of France” and pledged to follow the juste milieu—the middle of the road that avoided radical political extremes.

As Valjean reconciles with his past at the end of Les Misérables and finally understands that “to love another person is to see the face of God,” Romanticism is at its peak celebration of both emotional life and the unknown afterlife, nature and the supernatural, the Medieval past and the infinite future. Its brave-new-cultural-world outlook mirrors his final resolution from guilt to atonement … and it indeed allows him a new “life about to start / when tomorrow comes.”

An interesting side note: After spending four years studying American representative democracy from the wide-reaching perspectives of our Constitution, economics, separation of church and state, and societal attitudes toward women, French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville published in 1835 De La Démocratie en Amérique, which is commonly translated to Democracy in America. Tocqueville was interested in examining the successes and failings of our democratic revolution in comparison to the aftermath of the revolution in France—in particular the fall of the aristocratic class and the rise of the concept of equality. Among his conclusions: While democracy carries with it the danger of a tyranny of the majority and a loss of governmental control by the people, the promise of equality at its foundation was one of the greatest political and social ideas of his era … and the United States at the time was the quintessence of successful democratic equality.

Four years after the narrative of Les Misérables ends, Queen Victoria ascended the English throne at the age of 18 and ushered in a 63-year period of cultural influence and British expansion that lasted until the very dawn of the 20th century. While her reign saw both cataclysmic wars and monumental advances in technology, we can all agree here that the two defining landmarks of her monarchy were these: Iowa became the 29th of the United States in 1846; and in 1862, Victor Hugo introduced the world to Jean Valjean and his immortal journey through sacrifice, morality, love, penance and ultimately grace when he published Les Misérables.


Jake Stigers is a writer, singer, actor and incurable history buff living in Cedar Rapids. He hates to brag, but he saw the original production of Les Misérables in London.

Theater program notes: Canadian Brass

Written for the November 30, 2018, Canadian Brass tour concert at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

We warmly welcome Canadian Brass to our country
In the spirit of holiday welcome, we will gladly add meaningless extra Canadian letters to our words when we say our neighbours to the north play marvellously with colour, humour and gruelling labour
By Jake Stigers, recovering trombonist

Canadian Brass is an institution. A very serious musical ensemble that plays very serious music very seriously. I could not be any different degree of seriousness about this.

As such, it is worth investing a bit of your time and interest right now to learn everything there is to know about everything related to brass music to ensure you fully appreciate the Canadian Brass performance you’re about to hear.

Fortunately for you, I have condensed the entirety of brass-music history and knowledge into the following few short and not at all disjointed paragraphs. But don’t worry: There won’t be a test.


BASIC BRASS VOCABULARY THAT WILL BE ON THE TEST
Embouchure (say it with me: AHM-boo-shure): The way a brass player holds his or her lips, tongue, teeth and even facial muscles to blow or sometimes buzz air through an instrument. Some people compare it to kissing, but those people are wrong. Most beginning brass players and all Hancher audience members who’ve never played brass instruments are slightly alarmed that this odd lip-shape-buzz-thing even has a name.

Transposing instruments: This is extremely difficult to explain to people who haven’t had a lot of eggnog, but music for many brass instruments is written so that when a player sees a note on a page and plays that note, an entirely different but still usually pleasant note comes out. Nobody who hasn’t had a lot of eggnog knows why, but the fact remains that the sounds these transposing instruments (note: they’re called transposing instruments, if I forgot to mention that earlier) waft over unsuspecting audiences is an effluvium of lies. (Note to self: Effluvium of Lies is a great name for a brass quintet.) Fortunately for you the listener, the notes on the pages in front of the musicians here have all been laboriously recalibrated and neatly tuckpointed to the point that they will all come out relatively correctly. We hope.

Awesomeness: All brass instruments are awesome. Even the flüglehorn, but mostly because it has an umlaut. Anyway, put a bunch of brass instruments together into a quintet, and the awesomeness grows exponentially. Especially if they’re from Canada. And they have a cool band name.

Woodwinds: Woodwinds are not brass; they are the embarrassing cousins of brass who always have too much eggnog at what were supposed to be pleasant, un-alarming holiday parties. We are polite to woodwinds because they can hit lots of high notes—which reduces strain on the embouchures of brass players who don’t have to play them—but most woodwind players got to carry small instrument cases on the bus in middle school, and the brass players who had to carry the huge instrument cases simply cannot let go of their lingering resentment.

Percussion: Percussion is also not brass. Percussion is Latin—I think—for GO AHEAD AND TRY TO PLAY OVER ME YOU BRASS WIMPS I DARE YOU. In case you hadn’t noticed, percussion is loud. To make the situation worse, percussionists actually stand up so they can hit their drums and other hapless instruments with full body force to make them even louder. It’s not polite, and it’s not fair.

Strings: If you want to hear Canadian Strings, you’ll have to go to Violincouver. Because that is the only string-instrument-plus-major-Canadian-city mashup I can think of.

Ophthalmologist: This word has nothing to do with brass quintets—except for a possible causal relationship to the size of those little black music notes—but it’s included here to make sure you notice that it has two l’s. Most people misspell it, but now you won’t. It will also not be on the test.


MORE MUSICAL VOCABULARY THAT WILL BE ON THE TEST
Sharp: Often called a hashtag by the trendy kids, a sharp is an impossible-to-play-because-it’s-so-small tic-tac-toe board that is used to indicate that a note is raised one half step. Which is also called a semitone.

Flat: Often confused for a London apartment, a flat is a pointy little lowercase B (or I guess I could have typed that b) that is used to indicate that a note is lowered one half step. Which is still called a semitone.

Timbre (say it with me: TAM-ber): Also called tone color, the timbre (and I am not making this up: pronounce it TAM-ber or you will feel the cruel, oppressive judgment of every known musician past, present and future) is the character or perceived sound quality of a musical note or sound. It’s how we differentiate trumpets from sopranos (depending on the trumpets) or pianos from xylophones or the music that all these kids are listening to nowadays from rusty air horns.


NOW THAT YOU’RE UP TO TEMPO, LET’S GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS. OR BRASS INSTRUMENTS. WHATEVER.
Here is a comprehensive, meaningful, fully representative dissertation on every Canadian Brass instrument you’re about to hear. Or maybe just four of them.

THE TRUMPET
Used to signal charges (cash was also accepted) in battles as far back as 1500 BC, the trumpet is now the go-to brass instrument for people who are too weak to carry tubas around. Trumpets are made with curves and swirls of metallic tubing that are not unlike Iowa State Fair funnel cakes, but with three vertical piston valves right in front of the trumpeters’ faces, which would make my eyes cross if I had to look at them.

Grossest feature: The spit valve. It’s exactly like a spigot on a pitcher of refreshing lemonade except instead it dumps accumulated trumpeter spit on the floor. Which is in no way refreshing. Or lemonade. A spit valve is called a water key in more polite circles. And also because the stuff that comes out of a spit valve is mostly condensation from a player’s breath, but I dare you to convince every English-speaking brass player ever to stop saying spit valve.

Etymology: The Old French trompe means, poetically, "long, tube-like musical wind instrument.” So old French people who play the trumpet are called “longtubelikemusicalwindinstrumenters.”

Linear length of straightened trumpet tubing: 6 feet.

Fun fact: The original Olympic Games involved a five-foot trumpet called the Salpinx. My research does not clarify with absolute certainty whether the Salpinx was actually played like a trumpet or instead thrown like a javelin.

Mutes: As with all brass instruments, trumpets employ mutes to alter their sound. (Do you remember our discussion about the sound-changing differentiations of timbre? DO YOU REMEMBER HOW TO PRONOUNCE IT?) Mutes fit into the bell of a trumpet and and often get mistaken for standard barware like orange juicers and martini shakers. Which explains everything you need to know.

THE HORN
Often called the French horn, the plain-old horn is the only orchestra or band instrument that blows all of its sound backward in a direction where nobody can hear it except for the band moms who are waiting backstage with hugs and cookies. Whenever someone points out this ridiculous (I’m sorry but someone had to say it) design flaw, players of other brass instruments usually nod knowingly at each other and politely change the subject.

Grossest feature: While the spit valve—ahem, water key—is always totally gross, the horn has another gross trick up its sleeve … which is a pun because a horn player holds the horn by sticking one hand up its bell where all the humid horn air comes out, leaving the bell-holding hand what we will politely call clammy. Never high-five a horn player after a concert. You’ve been warned.

Etymology: The French made hoop-shaped hunting horns (alliteration runs rampant!) in the 1600s that they called trompes de chasse (which, as we can carry over from our trumpet etymology lesson, means “hunting long, tube-like musical wind instruments”). Because the French invented these horns, the English called them French horns. There’s no hiding stuff from the English.

Linear length of straightened horn tubing: 17 feet.

Fun fact: As I’ve pointed out earlier in the politest terms possible, the horn’s bell faces backward where I’m sorry but the audience could probably hear you better of you just hummed. As such, the horn is especially inefficient at blaring to the home-team crowds in a marching band. Enter: the mellophone! Not only does the mellophone have a forward-facing bell like all self-respecting marching-band instruments, but the bell has a huge, view-obstructing diameter that can leave its players tripping or wandering into the middle of the field without realizing it. Which serves them right for choosing an instrument that plays backward.

Mutes: Horn mutes probably look like trumpet mutes. I think. Since they’re used in backward-facing horn bells though, there’s really no way to know.

THE TROMBONE
The trombone is the long slidey brass instrument that has to sit back a few extra feet in a band or orchestra so it doesn’t hit the bassoons or saxophones or other lesser wind instruments in front of it when it stretches out to hit the low notes. While its shape should logically be a T (for Trombone), the consensus among people who discuss these things is that it’s shaped like an S (for Should Be A T But Whatever). Some trombones also have trumpet-type valves attached to the backs. Those are for trombonists who are too lazy to extend their long slidey things all the way for the low notes.

Key term: The long slidey part of a trombone is called a telescoping slide mechanism by the band kids who aren’t as cool as the other band kids. Which is really saying something.

Grossest feature: The spit valve on a trombone is also called a water key by people who are squeamish around the word spit. Because it’s at the far end of the telescoping mechanism, it leaves its spit puddle the farthest away from the musician—as opposed to other brass instruments that plop their spit right in front of the musicians and create serious actuarial hazards.

Etymology: The Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one ("big") make a trombone literally a "big trumpet.” But with a “telescoping slide mechanism.” And a “puddle of spit” that’s “really far away.”

Linear length of straightened trombone tubing: 9 feet. 13 feet if you measure with the slide fully extended. But why would anyone do that?

Fun fact: During the Renaissance, people called the trombone a sackbut. I am not making this up.

Mutes: Mute-as-in-shhh! mutes for trombones look like genie bottles or traffic cones sized for golden retrievers who drive. Wah-wah mutes (yes, that’s a thing) look like little toddler hats. Or the business ends of toilet plungers. Because some trombonists actually use the business ends of toilet plungers as wah-wah mutes. So wash your hands after you greet a trombonist after a muted performance. Or ever. (And this is no doubt the first time toilet plunger has appeared in a Hancher program. Three times, actually!)

THE TUBA
You will likely encounter three kinds of tubas in your lifetime, if you haven’t already: A concert tuba sits in a player’s lap and points straight up and politely doesn’t bump into other players. A hélicon is a tuba that wraps around a player’s body like a hug from a long-lost aunt at an awkward family reunion and points kind of upward so as to be heard as it’s being played while (and I am not making this up, though it sounds impossible to play a tuba in this situation) horseback riding. And a sousaphone is a super-round, super-curvy tuba that wraps around a player’s body and points its bell at the football stands and makes super-loud, super-awesome tuba noises.

Grossest feature: Have you ever seen a tuba spit valve? It looks like the Hoover Dam of the brass world. You could drown in the ensuing catastrophic deluge if it breaks. And that would be tu bad.

Etymology: Tuba is latin for “trumpet.” Latin was never good at measurements or perspective.

Linear length of straightened tuba tubing: 16 to 26 feet, depending on the type of tuba.

Fun fact: Two men named Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and Johann Gottfried Moritz patented what they called a “bass tuba” in 1835 with valves that they called “Berlinerpumpen.” All of those consonants are exactly the reason tubas are considered to be the spittiest of the brass instruments.

Other fun fact: Around 1900 there was some kind of spittin’ match (ahem) to build a tuba that played lower than the contrabass tuba, whose sound was already so low that it could only be measured on the Richter scale, which wouldn’t even be invented until 1935. So in 1913, some guys built what they called a “subcontrabass” for the World Exhibition in New York. It needed two players: one to blow in the mouthpiece and one to operate the valves. And six to clean up the spit.

Mutes: Tuba mutes are the same size and shape as Iowa tornadoes. Tuba Mutes is also a great name for a band. Especially a band of brass instruments. With five players. From Canada. Or not.


So congratulations! You can now count yourself up to speed on all things brass. And some things Canadian. All that’s left now is to enjoy the concert.

And to take the test.

Jake Stigers is a writer, singer, actor and recovering trombonist living in Cedar Rapids. He still harbors resentment toward all the flute players who could hold their instrument cases in their laps on the bus in middle school.

Theater program notes: Kinky Boots

Published April 13, 2018, for the Broadway national tour of Kinky Boots at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

Dragging drag into the spotlight: What does it mean beyond falsies and fierceness?
By Jake Stigers


“We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”

This famous—well, famous to those of us who pay attention to such things—quote by RuPaul in her 1996 book Lettin it All Hang Out: An Autobiography defined a new sensibility of and modern perspective on the evolution of drag writ large in a culture where it has exploded from gay-bar entertainment to mainstream art form. RuPaul is, of course, the towering, flawless-skinned doyenne of the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has enjoyed nine blindingly sequined seasons pitting expertly contoured drag-queen contestants against each other in a lip-synching-for-their-lives battle to be crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar.

So what exactly is drag?

Before we go any further, I want to make some distinctions: Drag queens, as you’re about to see in Kinky Boots, are essentially—and this paragraph is written in very general terms to provide very basic information for people who might not possess this understanding—men who dress as women for the sake of performing. They are different from transvestites, who are men (or women) who for any number of reasons enjoy dressing as women (or men) in private or in public. And transsexuals are people who feel that they were born the wrong gender and who undergo any degree of transformations from basic outward appearance to hormone therapy to surgery to change their genders … and then usually dress and live as completely as possible in those new genders.

Also before we go any further, I—your tall, not-at-all-petite writer—also want to offer some of my drag bona fides: I have dressed in drag on stage (I once rocked a black leotard and heels playing Velma Kelly in a loving re-creation of Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango” with the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus), I have dressed in drag in public (I attended a Christmas-drag-mandatory birthday party populated by ten sturdy, ridiculously-not-pretty drag queens dressed in various degrees of red-and-green tragedy at an otherwise respectable restaurant), I have dressed in drag at home (because walking fiercely in heels doesn’t just happen by magic), and given this vast experience in the drag world I eventually decided I needed my own drag name (Porcelain Bidet, thanks for asking).

So back to our question: What exactly is drag?

In the current popular-culture definition—and, again, in Kinky Boots—drag is men dressing and performing as women not to try to be women but to celebrate and elevate and experience the inherent fabulousness of women. And these men do drag for any number of reasons: Performing only as men is limiting, breaking gender constructs is subversive and provocative, bringing out an inner diva is both liberating and fierce, being a drag queen is just another role to play for an actor or singer or dancer … or sometimes men do drag just because it’s a whole lot of fun. Aside from wearing heels, of course. Because ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.

You can even parse drag into any number of subsets:

Comedic drag, like comedian Harvey Korman cross-dressing just to be silly in a decade of skits on The Carol Burnett Show.
Tragic drag, like actor Harris Glenn Milstead’s inspiredly disturbing drag character—and director John Waters’ muse—Divine in movies like 1974’s Female Trouble.
Gimmick drag, where men play women less for plausibility and more to drive wacky-hijinks plotlines, like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon unconvincingly donning frocks to escape the mafia in the 1959 movie Some Like it Hot, or Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari gussying up to save on rent in a not-very-observant-girls-only apartment building from 1980 to 1982 in the mercifully short-lived TV show Bosom Buddies.
Fabulous drag, which is an umbrella term for the work of all the men who dress as women, shimmer in the spotlight and reach for the stars in Kinky Boots, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and every gay bar in America with a stage and a good sound system.

We can also delineate a difference between drag on a stage and drag in public. While stage drag is about creating a character or performing as an idealized persona, drag in public—which, again, is entirely different from cross-dressing as a transvestite to feel comfortable or as a transexual person in an effort to achieve some level of “passing”—is usually done in the spirit of dressing in a costume just to have fun … or even perhaps to provoke a person-to-person response from people.

If we look at drag as something that provokes a response or makes an impression, it can mean practically anything. If I—a man who defaults to T-shirts, cargo shorts and old running shoes whenever possible—walk down the street instead in a black suit or a Santa hat and a red Speedo or a bunny outfit or a marabou-trimmed sweater and a skirt made from a repurposed poinsettia tablecloth—all of which I have done—I’m essentially wearing a costume that influences people either consciously or unconsciously to see—and react to—me in a certain way. Again: We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.

And then there’s the matter of what constitutes women’s clothing and what constitutes men’s clothing at any point in time. A mere 250 years ago, America’s Founding Fathers—like all their gentlemen contemporaries—wore heels, stockings and curled wigs ... all of which are articles of dress that only America’s mothers—and daughters and all women, of course, but I’m trying to use a clever father-mother parallel here—conventionally wear today. So at what point did these modes of dress cease to be men’s, start to be women’s, and then become iconic and fabulous enough to be appropriated by drag queens?

The cultural history of what constitutes drag for women doesn’t offer a clear parallel distinction, though; from a modern gender-conforming perspective, men wear pants and women wear dresses. But women also wear pants. Though it wasn’t always this binary. There were American laws enacted as recently as 1907 that forbade women from wearing trousers in public. It wasn’t until Marlene Dietrich was splashed all over the fan magazines wearing a black tuxedo to a 1932 movie premiere that attitudes toward women in pants started to shift; a year later, Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn wearing riding pants, and Vogue magazine published its first photos of women wearing slacks in 1939. And even though professional women were wearing menswear-inspired pants and suits by the 1970s, it wasn’t until 1993—that’s not a typo—that women were allowed to wear trousers on the U.S. Senate floor. (That last bit of information doesn’t really pertain to this narrative, though. I just stumbled on it in my research and found it flabbergasting enough that I thought it was worth sharing.)

Anyway, for the last half-century, women have been wearing menswear-style clothing in both casual and formal settings. So drag kings—women dressing and sometimes performing as the male counterparts to drag queens—have to be more and more diligent (and creative) in defining their drag-king personas.

It is at this point that a thorough, responsible researcher and writer would incorporate into his narrative the gender-appropriating fads of man-buns, guyliner and George Michael’s hair in his WHAM! years. I, however, will not.

So take a moment to look past the drag queens and their stories in Kinky Boots and notice the other characters and what they wear … and how it influences—or is influenced by—their stories. Then think about the story you tell every time you choose something to put on. Because even if it doesn’t include sequins or break the bounds of gender conformity, it would be a total drag if you didn’t celebrate the story it tells about you.


Jake Stigers is a writer, editor, blogger and performer living in Cedar Rapids. Porcelain Bidet is now permanently retired from performing and resides in a box somewhere in the attic.