Arnold spoke highly of Murphy, the musical mastermind behind the show’s pop music fabulosity. “Spud Murphy is an amazing human being, and he as a musician likes purity,” she told us. “There was nothing wrong with the originals, so why mess it up too much, I think, is the theory. His arrangement of all of the songs are fantastic.” She also emphasized the importance of her vocal regimen. “As a vocalist, it is much better for me to start to train my vocal cords and let them know what I’m doing every day, so even if I’m hoarse speaking I can click into those notes at any given time. It’s a good thing to be able to know you have something sitting in your pocket, and you know how to get to it.”

Now, if the vocally stunning Divas, with their high-glam shenanigans, are essentially drag queens themselves, hyperreal embodiments of drag perfection, it’s curious that some of the show’s male stars have yet to take to drag outside of work. Though Swenson had slipped into a dress momentarily for several other previous roles, he found himself researching for this role by going out in drag whilst performing in Hair in London, calling the experience “enlightening.”

“We went to a couple of gay clubs and a couple of straight clubs, and then we walked down the street and just wanted to experience the whole gamut,” said Swenson. “It’s a very specific skill set,” Nick Adams told us, “but it’s not what I do.” Adams, who’s performed in a number of Broadway shows previously, including A Chorus Line, Guys and Dolls, and La Cage aux Folles, steps into his first leading role in Priscilla. “It’s the most responsibility I’ve ever had, but it’s what I want to do.”

Adams is quick to dispel easy comparisons between La Cage and Priscilla. “They’re night and day. This show couldn’t be more different than La Cage aside from the fact that there are men dressed as women.” Costar Tony Sheldon supported this notion. Sheldon, who’s performed in the Australian, New Zealand, London, and Toronto incarnations of the show – the only performer to have remained with the cast since the original workshop – plays transsexual Bernadette in the show and seems to be having a blast.

“We’re very different from the film,” he told us. “The film had the desert, which we don’t have. What we’ve done is turned it into a fantasy version of the desert, so the songs are now in the forefront. But I felt a great responsibility to the integrity of the characters and the script. There’s not been a show that’s dealt with two gay guys and a transsexual in hostile territory. We’re not La Cage, where the lead characters are an accepted part of society. We’re dealing with people getting bashed and threatened, so it’s a very dangerous area we’re getting into, and I just wanted to make sure we stayed true to the original story in that regard.”