Flesh! Pasties! Sequins! Sell-out crowd packs Montreal’s best burlesque drag show of the year

Montreal drag legend Manny backstage at Cafe Cleopatra (Photo by Cassandre Poblah)

Montrealers lined up outside Café Cleopatra on The Main to see the city’s “premiere singing, dancing and stripping drag queen” Billy L’Amour host what turned out to be hands-down the best drag and burlesque show of the year.

While folks lined up outside Cleopatra’s – a showbar since 1893 and the last hold-out of Montreal’s famed Sin-City era red-light district – inside the packed second-floor showbar the loud and rowdy audience screamed for more..

“I felt compelled to do this because I have been HIV-positive for 10 years and on my own journey I am thankful to now be in place where I am healthy and have stability,” L’Amour told POP TART. “We are living longer lives, with normal life expectancy, and I want to honour the people before us whose shoulders we are standing on today.”

Burlesque performers Cherry Typhoon and The Lady Josephine (with her crowd-pleasing strip-tease to Madonna’s Vogue), hilarious singing-comedian Lise Vigneault, amazing contemporary dancer Gerard Reyes (he can vogue with the best of them), superb rapping drag king Nat King Pole, drag queen Peaches LePage (who gave the most heartfelt performance of the night, on the cello), 65-year-old drag legend Twilight (impersonating Diana Ross), X-rated circus contortionist / boylesque performer Roscoe Stone, drag star Manny’s roof-raising tribute to Whitney Houston, not to mention triple-threat Billy L’Amour, who has everything it takes to become a big star in Vegas.

“I also want to take Billy on the road and perform in cabarets around the world,” says Billy, a former soloist dancer with La La La Human Steps. “I think drag is inherently the most burlesque-type of performance that people don’t consider to be burlesque, because drag is all about extravagance, exaggeration and sexuality in performance, and that’s also what I think the main things in burlesque are. Drag has been doing that forever.”

All proceeds from the World AIDS Day Cabaret de GL’AMOUR benefit hosted by L’Amour and produced by Puelo Deir benefit AIDS Community Care Montreal (ACCM), the city’s unique HIV/AIDS support group for anglophones and allophones. For over 25 years ACCM has been working to enhance the quality of life of those living with HIV/AIDS, and to help prevent HIV transmission. People can always make donations big and small to ACCM by clicking on the “I Commit” button at http://accmontreal.org/.

Overall it was a wildly imaginative show (notably Billy’s showstopping Liberace routine), and the gorgeous Cabaret de GL’AMOUR set was designed by luxury drapes designer and decorator Andre Dumont.

Also, the photos below (unless otherwise indicated) were snapped by award-winning photographer Michael Abril.

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