Bianca Del Rio, Smut, Drama & Drag
29 Mar 2022  - Photo: Jovanni Jimenez-Pedraza

Bianca’s UNSANITIZED tour is a subversive stand-up set that merges improvisation into a significant portion of the show. Bianca’s ability to werk the audience is rooted in her quick wit, and so her show being dependant on audience involvement adds a lot more variables for her to manage in real time. It also means that now two shows are quite the same and Bianca is on top of all of it.

Her second, and last, show in Toronto was at a packed 3,200 seat Meridian Hall on March 23. True to form, partway into the show Bianca stopped dead in her tracks, pivots around on stage, and locks eyes on a women who was standing up, snapping pictures during the show. “Shut that fucking camera off, it’s distracting!” her words echoing through the theatre. Bianca went on to take a strip off this women and making an absolute spectacle of her, and with good reason. She was performing a show which she’s worked tirelessly to craft. Unlike a rock concert, a performance is more intimate with Bianca being able to see all the faces looking up at her - but this woman must have thought she was invisible or that she was now part of the show, providing strobe-lighting from her seat. All this distraction caused by one middle-aged cis-gendered straight woman. Now I don’t know for sure if she was cis-gendered, but given that the largest demographic for RuPaul’s Drag Race continues to be predominately white cis gendered females, under the age of forty*

Biancas show was hysterical, edgy and subversive but many of these women travel in packs and are sloshed to the gills. It’s not your bridal shower party, this show is about Bianca. Added to this the opening act gave made a big deal about not taking pictures or you’ll get tossed out. Harsh, maybe but it’s her show and it should down the way she wants it to.

Speaking of the opening act, Wendy Ho was incredible, her voice cut through the auditorium and she sang beautifully about butt sex, smut and being a ho - it was fantastic! She been touring and smutting together with Bianca for the past sixteen years. Wendy identified herself as a “Female cis gendered drag queen, who is every bit as fierce as the boys on Drag Race” And fierce she was, her lyrics, though filthy, her voice grand and powerful.

You can’t take UNSANITIZED too seriously because it was designed to be confrontational, even the trigger warnings were offensive, which is Bianca’s entire point for the show, and the audience loved every minute of the abuse. About midway through, she started dishing on gender and pronouns and I couldn’t help but wonder if the predominately cis gendered crowd may have walked away with a skewed notion that it’s okay not respect someone a pronoun or that refusing to acknowledge someone’s gender is somehow a funny thing to do. Queer people need to back one another up, now more than ever because for many being scene it’s a matter of life or death.But the fact that I’m a little offended is precisely what she intended to do, and so I can look beyond that and appreciate that the show as a whole was a dynamite experience. Toronto was her last stop on the Canadian portion of the tour which had fourteen stops across Canada. The next leg on her journey takes her through Latin America, UK, Europe, Israel and finishing off in the US. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to go wash my hands!