After a seemingly never-ending winter, the delicate blossom that is Lady Bunny is ushering in the spring season with a new, seasonal set list of her trademark raunchy song parodies and one-liners. The drag legend returns to Manhattan's Green Room 42 this Friday in Lady Bunny: April Fool.
"Last year, I broke my toe and had to perform in one of those awful boots,” Bunny recalls. “This year, I guess I'll have to come up with another excuse for not being able to dance.”
While no one associates the 61-year-old drag queen with anything fresh, the old dog has learned a few tricks over these last few months. She’s been performing shows out west, where audiences have cheered her new material, including her self-penned dance track about Ozempic.
Her latest savage parody medleys skewer celebrities from Todrick Hall to Drag Race queens. She also draws inspiration from Beyonce's “Texas Hold 'Em”, performing a barrel full of reinterpreted versions of downhome country ditties made popular by Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Bobbie Gentry, Gretchen Wilson and Shania Twain. In addition, Bunny presents an original country song she wrote about love on a farm.
For fans of Bunny’s trademark Laugh-In joke routines, Bunny adds new zingers targeting, among other news stories, Wendy Williams’ dementia diagnoses and Caitlyn Jenner’s busy few months celebrating both Mothers' Day and Fathers' Days. She gets political, too. In one bit, she announces how “Joe Biden has a new VP pick who will spruce up his image and make him look younger: Dianne Feinstein!” She later muses how “You really have to give Trump credit—because he's completely out of cash!?”
And then there’s the fashion. Says Bunny, “I'll be wearing several stunning new gowns." In other words, she'll be wearing another loud, tacky floral print muumuu to match the show’s springtime theme.
Lady Bunny is an internationally beloved drag icon, comedian, recording artist and jet-set DJ. She is as famous for her big-banged bouffant and her notoriously naughty wit as for her ability to get a dance floor jumping. A Manhattan gal since the early 80s, Lady Bunny shares Atlanta roots with fellow drag star and former roommate, RuPaul, and is most famous for co-founding and emceeing Wigstock, the annual New York City Labor Day outdoor drag festival that ran for nearly twenty years. She tours constantly, taking her bodaciously bawdy brand of humor to audiences all over the world. She has shared the stage and screen with many of her idols including Patti Labelle, Joan Rivers, Bea Arthur, Charo, Elvira, Lynda Carter, Chaka Khan, Grace Jones, Loleatta Holloway, Jocelyn Brown, Martha Wash, Margaret Cho. She opened for Christina Aguilera at Radio City Music Hall, who later tweeted, “Upstaged at my own show! #Diva.”
Lady Bunny’s comic genius has also been featured in films and television, most recently in Wig, the HBO Wigstock documentary made with Neil Patrick Harris, and the feature film, Hurricane Bianca: From Russia with Hate. She was the “Dean of Drag” on three seasons of RuPaul’s Drag U, has been roasted by Joan Rivers, roasted Pam Anderson on The Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson, and emceed the LGBT prom in one of the most popular episodes of Sex and the City. This summer, Bunny will appear in Playland, a film that Variety calls "a haunting and haunted collage of queer history comes to life."
Come see why the New York Times calls Lady Bunny “the city’s reigning drag queen” and Vogue says she “represents the heart of what drag is all about.”
Tickets for LADY BUNNY: APRIL FOOL at Green Room 42 (570 tenth Avenue, on the 4th Floor of Yotel NYC) are $22 here. Four shows: April 12, 14, 17, 24 at 7pm. 18+ only. Please note that there is also a food/drink minimum at all performances; full dinner menu available.