Joey Arias in Arias with a Twist. Photo: Richard Termine

One could call Arias with a Twist a cabaret show, in the same way one could call Blazing Saddles a Western or Twin Peaks a nighttime soap: an entirely true statement on the face of it that does nothing to convey the wild, virtuosic originality that makes it a pleasure to watch. A spectacle performed by downtown drag icon Joey Arias, infused with retro pop-culture tropes, old Hollywood glam, and “what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas” naughtiness–and brought to exuberant visual life by the mad-scientist puppet creations of auteur and MacArthur genius Basil Twist–the show is an exuberant journey into a New York avant-garde that feels nearly lost.

Arias with a Twist is not a new show; it was performed in this very theater nearly twenty years ago, a confection engineered on a lark to fill a gap in HERE’s production calendar. But it’s lost none of its glitz, none of its weird, none of its charm, in the two decades since. As master puppet creator, director, and visual designer, Twist builds bright and trippy dreamscapes, and has ways of turning objects into characters and channeling unexpected wells of emotion through his humanoid (and alienoid) creatures. Performer Arias’s brassy broad of a chanteuse is louche, luscious, and lascivious in all the right places. It’s a throwback, and what a glorious one, to not only the scrappy inventiveness of the NY Fringe Festival and an earlier downtown theater scene, but to a defiantly analog creativity in our increasingly (and often alarmingly) digitally dependent world. 

But more than any of that, the show is a wacky delight that both takes Arias seriously as a drag/cabaret star and has a lot of fun with exploding the very idea of a serious cabaret show into mayhem. Twist’s creations, which often blur the line between scenery and puppetry, are a grab bag of all the ways to think about the art of puppetry: Visual gags done with objects, like a series of ever-receding curtains and some extremely suggestive jungle flora. Full-person-size figures like a posse of gray-man aliens who inspect Arias while he’s strapped on a rotating apparatus, or a can-can line of zaftig beauties with identical faces. Human augmentations, like the octopus arms above (or a bit with extra legs that I won’t spoil by including the photo.) Plays on scale, like Godzilla-size human legs trampling an animated glowing cityscape or a mini-me of Arias. And, most classically and perhaps most magically, a marionette orchestra (which I believe are puppets nearly 100 years old that Twist inherited from his grandfather)–all of it brought to life with uncanny poignancy by a six-person ensemble of gifted puppeteers.  

Joey Arias in Arias with a Twist. Photo: Richard Termine

And that barely scratches the surface of its fizzy, witty visual and auditory delights. Lighting designer Ayumu “Poe” Segusa’s follow-spots have excellent comic timing, and creative use of string lights make the space seem to recede into the depths of a galaxy, or give Twist’s cityscape the glow of NYC by night. Projection designer Daniel Brodie mimics classic Hollywood newsreels at one moment and makes rainbow fish swim through the space the next. (The interplay between puppets and projections is a series of marvelous effects all on its own.) The use of an Arias “mini-me” puppet gives full-size Joey someone to play off occasionally. The costumes (originally by Manfred Thierry Mugler and re-created for this production by Fritz Masten) tip to 80s-era Madonna and Arias’s muse Billie Holiday at the same time. The music mixes originals by Alex Gifford and Griff Williams with an eclectic array of interpretations (arrangements by Eliot Douglass and Jean Houle Francoise) that include Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” a few Beatles tunes, Joni Mitchell, and of course Holiday.

I am, admittedly, more readily charmed by puppets than some, but Arias with a Twist really does offer multiple angles from which to enjoy it: the ingenuity and razzle-dazzle of Twist’s effects; stagecraft that gives plenty of opportunities for transformation even within a tiny space; the architecture of a classic cabaret show; and the tongue—and some other bits—firmly in cheek persona of Joey Arias. Arias, who is well into his seventies, may have to hang up his eyelashes someday, but I’m very glad that day has not yet come.