Better late than never, yes? Yes! Sorry we’re a couple of days late with this one, but we were very busy celebrating the birth of freedom this weekend. Now. Shall we be bitter? Yes! Let’s be bitter.
This’ll be a short one, which serves our purposes (a post celebration of freedom hangover) well. It seems to us, after watching this latest spin on the variety show wheel, that we would be doing a disservice to these queens if we blamed any of them for how low-energy this season appears to be. It’s not their fault there are no eliminations and none of them are working toward a goal of winning anything for themselves. But as we’ve noted many a time this season, the lack of any stakes seemed to have had a somewhat disastrous effect on the performances. Every challenge on Drag Race is now a legacy challenge, meaning they’ve all been done before in at least a dozen previous seasons. Realistically, an All-Stars season of nothing but legacy challenges should be yielding results that sit among the best ever attempted for those challenges.
In other words, we should be seeing legendary snatches, legendary makeovers, legendary roasts, and legendary lip syncs. For the most part, we have not seen any of these things. To that list, we can add a non-legendary Rusical, but something was a little different about this one. The results were lackluster, but the queens were all, across the board, giving it their best shot. In other words, the material was incredibly weak but the performances almost made up for it. Except for the finale number, almost all of the songs were forgettable and none of the written jokes landed all that well (the judges’ peals of laughter and knee-slapping notwithstanding). It also had some really odd pacing issues, with most of the stage empty except for these three for far too long. Shannel did a lovely job with her Barbra-esque character. Honestly, we think Angeria’s limitations are only becoming more pronounced each week. She’s funny, but all of her characters are pretty much exactly the same. She’s supposed to be doing a take on Ruth Gordon, but her delivery is completely indistinguishable from her Marla Gibbs. Plastique’s entire job was to be cutesy and slutty. She nailed it.
Gottmik couldn’t have been better cast as Regan and she was clearly having a lot of fun with it. We realize that the costumes for the Rusical are provided, but we have to send kudos out to whoever came up with beaded vomit. Our only critique with her character was how the production clearly stopped in mid-song in order to put that gimmicky spinning wig on her. We don’t have any illusions about this production being a completely above-board competition, but that took us right out of the number. You can’t really make any assessments of how she did if the whole number needs to stop in order to pull off a gimmick she didn’t ask for.
We thought this was Nina until Nina came out. We’ll give Roxxxy credit for really going there, but this is one of those looks that sort of begs the question as to whether there’s a line separating horror makeup from drag. We suppose the sparkle adds something draggy to the look, but this just feels like a really good Halloween costume. We’d have liked a little more camp in the look.
She was perfect and her dancing was hilarious.
We don’t know… maybe the expectations were too high or maybe the number just didn’t give her anything to work with, but we felt like this performance fell a little flat.
Then Vanjie came out and mopped the floor with these bitches. Seriously, where the hell did that come from? FINALLY someone on this season of Drag Race All-Stars put out an all-star-worthy performance. It’s honestly a little silly that she didn’t win this one.
Category Is: Bring Back My Pearls! Whose lewk was pearl-fection?
An all-new #AllStars9 is now streaming on @paramountplus ✨ pic.twitter.com/Sl2G5TooOj
— RuPaul’s Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) July 5, 2024
Plastique was typically gorgeous, Angeria stepped her pussy up, Shannel’s was surprisingly weird, Gottmik’s was insanely gorgeous, Roxxy’s, like most of her costumes this season, was underwhelming, ditto Jorgeous, Nina’s, like a lot of her costumes this season, was overdesigned and borderline ugly, and Vanjie ate that shit up.
We were thrilled to see Shannel get a win under her belt, but we would have given the second slot to Vanjie over Jorgeous.
We had a hunch that Ru was going to give both queens the win because it completely upended the standings. Jorgeous and Shannel wound up giving their extra badges to each other, which means Shannel suddenly has two and Jorgeous suddenly has four. It’s anyone’s game at this point. Not really, but let’s go with the illusion for now.
Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life, a New York Times “New and Notable” pick, praised by The Washington Post “because the world needs authenticity in its stories,” and chosen as one of the Best Books of The Year by NPR is on sale wherever fine books are sold! It’s also available in Italian and Spanish language editions, darlings! Because we’re fabulous on an INTERNATIONAL level.
[Photo Credit: Paramount Plus via Tom and Lorenzo, World of Wonder Productions, Inc./Paramount+]
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