RuPaul's Drag Race: Night of the Living Drag is coming to the Rosemont Theater on Tuesday, Oct. 25, starring Yvie Oddly as The Boogie Man and featuring a cast of other stars from RuPaul's Drag Race.
The 11th annual Halloween spectacular draws inspiration from Dante's Divine Comedy and will be shown in eight cities throughout the country. In the show, Oddly summons seven other queens, each representing a different kind of evil, "for a fierce and frightful exploration into all of the world's most wicked sins."
"I don't want to give anything about the show away, but let's just say, I'm going to be hitting new heights in this show," Oddly said. "It's going to be a freaky, freaky night."
Oddly won RuPaul's Drag Race in 2011 during the seventh season and appeared in RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars 7 this year, but her drag personality was born on Halloween.
"It's not uncommon for drag queens to have our birth on Halloween," Oddly said. "It's the one day where people get to dress up as anything they want. I've tried to carry the spirit of Halloween with me every day of the year, every year of my life, to remind myself I can be who I want to be."
"It's so full circle for me to get to host a show that's literally about tearing off the preconceptions and just having an ooky, spooky good time," Oddly said.
Other Drag Race stars who will join Oddly on stage include Aquaria the Sloth, Asia O'Hara the Envious, Bosco the Lustful, DeJa Skye the Greedy, Kim Chi the Glutton, Lady Camden the Proud, Roseì the Vain and Vanessa Vanjie the Wrathful.
"All the girls are just great; it feels like all the stars have aligned," said Oddly. "I'm so excited to be doing Halloween drag—my favorite kind—in one of my favorite places with all of the sins."
One of Oddly's favorite parts about doing drag is asking questions in order to imagine new looks to experiment with. She especially loves Halloween drag because the answers are even more limitless, she said.
Oddly said, "Instead of, like, 'What would it look like if I pretend to be a different gender?', it's like, 'What would I look like if I wasn't even from this planet?'"
When creating looks, Oddly's inspiration comes from "all over the place," but they tend to come back to color and nature as sources of creativity.
"Some of my favorite looks and concepts come from sea creatures because they're so scary," Oddly said. "We know so little about the sea, they're like a bunch of literal aliens living right here on our planet. I've never seen an Anglerfish in real life, what if it's a gorgeous blue with a beautiful smile?"
Imagining and executing new ways of being through drag is the way Oddly "taps into the part of me that knows 'I am worth it. I am here. I deserve to take up space.'"
"At some of my first jobs, when I was working retail or drive-thrus, I used to try so hard not to be perceived," Oddly said. "I didn't want to be seen because I didn't want to stand out. Over time, I learned from other queer people that expression is a good thing, a tool to use to speak to who I am."
To buy tickets for RuPaul's Night of the Living Drag, visit vossevents.com/night-of-the-living-drag.
