Maxx Hollywood of the Chicago Kings drag troupe
On the list of things Chicago lacked at the beginning of 2001, a women’s drag-show scene probably wasn’t near the top. Apparently, though, more than a few people were thinking about it. When the Chicago Kings—a performance troupe of women who dress as men and perform elaborate skits to music—took the stage that spring, more than 300 people crammed into a tiny West Loop bar to watch. In the four years since, roughly 30 Kings have performed at more than 150 events around the country. Locally, they host one big show every quarter, which attracts people from varied walks of life. Before the group’s annual Pride show, Kings producer Maxx Hollywood spoke to The A.V. Club about the group’s surprising popularity, maintaining interest, and Will & Grace.
The A.V. Club: It seems like the Chicago Kings shows were popular right away. Did that surprise you?
Maxx Hollywood: It did. We were like, “Oh well, if 70 people come, then we’ll consider that a hugely successful night.” We were really taken aback by it, and then it just exploded—every show after that, we were like, “This is going to be the show where people start to lose interest.” But they just kept coming.
AVC: What do you think made it so popular?
MH: I think people were just hungry for something different; they were hungry to see things on stage that they’ve never seen before. By having a diverse collection of individuals in our group… As an audience, I think people can identify with something that they see during a show. It might not be every act that they see, but at some point, there’s going to be something up there that they can connect with in some way—and there’s a lot of humor.
AVC: You also have some political stuff as well.
MH: The politics were a little bit of an afterthought. Initially, it was not something that we thought about at all. It wasn’t until we became more educated and started to get invited to universities and performed for young college kids who haven’t had much exposure to gay culture, let alone more radical queer culture, or gender queer culture, anything like that… Will & Grace is about the most extreme thing that most people get exposed to, and to see how important that is for these kids, that’s been a really wonderful thing. It’s amazing to have all these different types of people at the shows, standing next to each other. As long as they’re laughing, then they’re going to get along. They’re going to forget their own personal politics and their own prejudices, and they’re going to be able to open themselves up a little more.
AVC: Have you ever had problems at shows with people who weren’t that way?
MH: No, actually, we’ve been incredibly lucky. We’ve had very little negative feedback about things in general. We haven’t gotten harassed very much, even though we’ve performed in really odd places, like in the middle of nowhere in Indiana. It’s been really great. The reception has been really positive and really wonderful, and I think part of that is we like to laugh at ourselves a lot, you know? We take our lives and we take people’s issues very seriously, but we laugh a lot.
AVC: You have your quarterly shows, but you have these monthly “Kingdom Come” shows at Circuit as well, which is your “amateur night.”
MH: We’re not really calling it an amateur show anymore. We’ve been calling it an “open drag mic” because we really want everybody to perform at these things, not just drag kings, so queens and any sort of gender performance of some sort or another [are welcome]. It mostly ends up being kings, but we want to encourage all different types of people to come out to make it more interesting. There’s no competition, so you just get up and you perform, and you have good time with it.
AVC: You mentioned before being worried about people losing interest. How have you avoided that?
MH: When we first started out, we jumped at absolutely every chance we had to perform: every benefit, everything big and small, and whatever it was, we were there because we wanted to get the word out, and we wanted to get more people involved and exposed to it. We realized two things: One is that our performers have other lives and can’t perform all the time. [Laughs.] We didn’t want to start taxing our performers too much, because then it would make their performances and their interest start to wane. And we started thinking about oversaturating the market. We wanted to keep people interested. Our hope is that the big, quarterly, theme-based shows are very different than the “Kingdom Come” shows, and there’s real, direct audience interaction at “Kingdom Come” shows. They’re a lot more raw because we don’t know what people are going to bring on stage—or what they’re going to do—and I think our audience knows that. It’s a little more edgy, a little more unpredictable, whereas our theme-based shows actually have a dress rehearsal, and there’s a lot more that goes into the overall feel of the night, like decorations and other activities. We try to overstimulate people as much as possible.
