He’s dreaming of a weird Christmas

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 10 / Devember 1 - 7, 2006

Performance

“Dina Martina’s Yule Log”
December 12 & 13
The Cutting Room
19 West 24th Street
(212-691-1900; thecuttingroomnyc.com)

Victoria Renard

“Dina Martina’s Yule Log” is anything but a turkey

He’s dreaming of a weird Christmas

Dina Martina’s oddly entertaining Holiday extravaganza is not everyone’s cup of nog

By Will McKinley

“Thanks for coming out and braving the winter wonderland,” drag performer Dina Martina said to a packed house at The Cutting Room on an unseasonably balmy night at the beginning of the Holiday season. She was being ironic, of course. And by she I mean Grady West, the Seattle performance artist who created the character of Dina in 1989 and has brought her to New York for a Felliniesque Christmas pageant called “Dina Martina’s Yule Log” — a pop culture-drenched pastiche of bad music, weird puns and odd prizes. If you prefer your Yuletide cheer spiked with a shot of the bizarre, then this is the show for you.

There are two types of people in the world: those who enjoy Disneyfied holiday fare like “The Santa Clause 3” or “Deck the Halls,” and those who do not. Both were in attendance on Wednesday at the second of Dina Martina’s four shows at the Chelsea cabaret co-owned by Chris Noth, of “Sex and the City” fame. Midway through the seventy-five minute show, a party of three silver-haired Baby Boomers seated in the back of the show room threw a $10 bill on the table and promptly walked out.

“This is awful,” the departing female audience member whispered to her male counterparts as they made a hasty exit, leaving a nearly full glass of red wine tragically undrunk.

Actually, they walked out during one of my favorite moments of the show: Dina’s heartfelt rendition of “Life in a Northern Pole,” a sharply written parody of the 1986 hit “Life in a Northern Town” (Sample lyric: “And the children drank nog from eggs.”) By singing, of course, I don’t really mean singing. Dina’s voice produces more of a shrill warble, with the occasional operatic flourish. The lady who left early was right. It was absolutely awful — but also absolutely perfect if you got the joke. Finally, Dina Martina has created a Christmas Spectacular for the rest of us, filled with steam-of-consciousness patter, and a grab bag of pop songs from the 1970s and ‘80s, retrofitted with half-Christmas/half-nonsense lyrics. And all of it performed by an overweight man in Ronald McDonald face paint, wearing a black, shag wig with a poinsettia bloom and a lime green mini-dress three sizes too small.

Dina explained to the audience that she had not, in fact, put on weight this year. “The camera adds ten pounds,” she confessed. “But the stage adds eighty or ninety.”

The speaking voice that West affects for the Dina character is a cross between Liza Minnelli and a Mid-western Sunday School teacher, with a sprinkle of Ebonics thrown in for some artificial flava. She repeatedly referred to the audience as peeps, while awarding them with jokey prizes like New Kids on the Block trading cards, Cheetos-flavored lip balm and an LP called “Christmas with Colonel Sanders.”

Often, the crowd didn’t seem sure of when — or if — they should laugh. The result was a refreshingly organic, comedic anarchy. At a time when mainstream comedy is all about telegraphed punch lines and overly familiar situations, Dina Martina shines through the foggy Christmas Eve like Rudolph’s trusty red nose. “Yule Log” is simultaneously witty yet stupid, indecipherable yet perfectly clear.

You might expect a drag Christmas show in Chelsea to push the envelope of good taste, but West avoided the temptation to aim at easy targets, or resort to sophomoric punch lines. The bluest moment of the surprisingly clean show may have been Dina’s joke about her magician ex-boyfriend:

“He used to come over and give me slight-of-hand jobs,” Dina quipped, as Bob Hope smiled down upon her from his big USO show in the sky.