Sing along if you know this one, or even if you don’t.
Mama Pearl’s Sing-Along Drag Show returns to Mycelium Gallery, 2816 N. Pennsylvania Ave., 7 p.m. Sunday June 15 for a Special Edition Pride Show.
“We’re gonna change the format up a little bit,” said Alice Pearl MacArthur, aka Mama Pearl. “Rather than the traditional drag format of the host vamping and telling silly jokes and then the artist singing, each artist is going to have a 10-minute slot to tell their Pride story and then each performer’s going to sing songs that relate to their story somehow.”
The “traditional” format for MacArthur’s show already offers something a little different for drag fans. Instead of lip-syncing and dancing to music, performers sing the songs themselves, sometimes with a karaoke-style backing track, sometimes with live instrumentation. Usually, the songs are popular covers, but sometimes they’re traditional folk songs or originals. In any case, the lyrics are projected on a screen at the front of the room so everyone can join in.
“When you create a sing-along environment, you are, in a way, inviting the audience up on stage with you,” MacArthur said. “You’re allowing them to not just observe the show, but to participate. In that way, it’s very reminiscent of how a lot of us grew up in church where the songs would be familiar and repetitive, and there was an expectation that the congregation would function as the chorus. And I really like that energy. It’s probably the main thing I miss from church.“Singing uses a part of our brain that we normally hold in reserve, keep hidden, and allows us to reach a level of intellectual comfort with other people we normally wouldn’t have. Singing together opens the door for more intimate conversations.”
Mycelium Gallery co-owner Alana Vee Anderson, who initially suggested a sing-along show to MacArthur after seeing her perform on Prescription Drag, another regular show at the gallery, agreed and added that the drag element brings a different kind of energy to the show that encourages audience members to open up even more.
“I think it makes it more fun,” Anderson said, “because drag is playful anyway and something that helps people push their boundaries, too.”
The June Pride show is targeted toward an all-ages audience.
“Drag as a performance art is more universal than just being adult entertainment,” MacArthur said.
Performers will drop the burlesque elements and bawdy jokes more appropriate for the show’s typical 18-plus audience in favor of sharing their personal coming-out stories, but MacArthur warned that many of these stories are “likely going to be very sad.”
“If you’re trans in the Midwest, your story is tragic,” MacArthur said. “There’s not a happy trans story in the Midwest right now. Even if your family’s cool, society is not.”
MacArthur’s shows might be different from typical drag shows, because MacArthur, a trans woman who started drag this year following more than 20 years playing gospel and folk music, is not a typical drag performer.
Since she transitioned three years ago, MacArthur said her reception at folk concerts varies.
“I’ve done some shows in some outlying towns, and the energy is tense,” MacArthur said. “I cannot pretend to not be trans. I didn’t come out till I was 30. I have this jawline; it’s not going anywhere. And sometimes I’m really floored. I’ve played at a couple of Episcopalian churches in town, and they love me and accept me for who I am. They use the right pronouns … and I love that. But I’ve also definitely played at some places where, after I play a song or two, they ask me to get off the stage because they don’t want to have that conversation.”
MacArthur said more traditional drag spaces have not always been accepting either.
“I was told very strongly no by a large portion of the drag community up on 39th Street,” MacArthur said. “They told me to go do burlesque because I wanted to actually be a binary femme, and for them, the whole gender as a performance thing is very central to what drag is.”
Mama Pearl’s Sing-Along shows fit somewhere between the folk and drag spaces, but MacArthur said the gap is easier to bridge than people might expect.
“The folk scene, raised and bathed in workers’ rights and civil rights, has a lot in common with the LGBTQ-plus scene,” MacArthur said. “I think there’s a lot of overlap and shared goals that isn’t immediately apparent, and so I like muddying the waters a little bit. Ultimately, that has been my goal … to show people that the distances between us are far shorter than they think they are.”
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This article appears in deadCenter Film Festival 2025.