Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme Hit the Road for Ninth Holiday Tour

By Elena Vasquez

The Jinkx and Dela Holiday Show! launches its ninth national tour this season, with stops in Cincinnati, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco and Atlanta, drag performers Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme told Variety. The tour closes, as tradition dictates, in Seattle — the city where their friendship began — from Dec. 21 through Dec. 24. Tickets are already in high demand.

The pair spoke to Variety ahead of a performance at The Eastern Theater in Atlanta, Ga., days after what they call a "blue tsunami" of election results. Monsoon contrasted this year's mood with the tour's first preview two years ago, held the night Donald Trump won a second term.

"It felt hard to get on stage then because we knew that there was a lot of BS in store," Monsoon said. "It's been a very sordid time to be a queer and trans person."

What has changed for the duo this year?

Monsoon said packed houses across the country remind her the queer community reaches everywhere. "Our community exists everywhere," she said. "The queer community is a global community, and it's wonderful to remember that. Even at the darkest times, we have a community to turn to."

She added: "It feels like a Christmas miracle to not have to be fighting as hard to get people to listen to something that should be basic information."

BenDeLaCreme, who co-writes and co-stars, described the new show's theme. "This year's show is about how the future is always unknown," she said. "We've been fed a lot of rhetoric about inevitable futures, and the next thing can be anything." She framed the tour's timing as a confluence: "It's very exciting — things coinciding in a way that's just celebratory and hopeful."

Why is Ebenezer Scrooge buying the show?

This year's plot has a billionaire — Ebenezer Scrooge — buy out the holiday show. Monsoon explained the creative logic: "We like to have the serious conversations in the stupidest way possible."

She said the storyline addresses a dilemma working artists face. "Do you want to be an artist or do you want to eat?" Monsoon asked. "Art has been attacked and left out to fend for itself recently, and everything's about what's going to make money, not what's the best possible art."

Live entertainment, she argued, is the exception. "Art is surviving and thriving in live entertainment — even though a lot of filmed media feels like it's being pushed through the same sausage maker of capitalism."

BenDeLaCreme extended the point. "Live entertainment — seeing a performer in front of you — is one of the few things we can still really trust is real and happening, right?" she said. "You don't exchange energy with people over a screen in the same way."

How do Tim Curry and Dolly Parton fit in?

The show includes musical tributes to Tim Curry and Dolly Parton, whom Monsoon called "two huge multigenerational queer icons who are very much alive in the zeitgeist and still are."

The duo begins each year's writing process from a blank slate, with BenDeLaCreme bringing assignments — a Top 40 song, a cultural moment or a movie — that demand a place in the script. This year she arrived insisting on both a Dolly song and a Tim Curry song, Monsoon recalled: "I don't know how we're going to do it, but we got to get a Dolly song, and we got to get a Tim Curry song."

Monsoon said the resulting staging could not exist outside the show's own logic. "Within the show, it's a seat of honor," she said.

The Variety interview was edited for length and clarity.

With nine consecutive touring years behind them, Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme have turned a seasonal one-off into a national franchise — one that now doubles as an annual barometer of the country's political mood.