Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
If you’re familiar with the Vineyard Theatre near Union Square, be prepared for an eye-popping surprise if you go to see Ms. Blakk for President, an unusual new show by Tarell Alvin McRaney and Tina Landau, the latter also directing. The lobby areas have been painted hot pink and informational postings are provided on the walls.
Designer David Zinn has ripped out the auditorium’s conventional seating to create a cabaret-like environment. Fixed seating areas fill the space at various angles, while others use cocktail table set ups, tiny lamps included. All the seating is placed within the angles created by a raised stage in the middle of the room consisting of an X-patterned series of runway platforms whose shiny black surfaces have pink slogans (difficult to read from my seat) painted on them. Vintage TV monitors showing archival video clips (credit: Rasean Davonté Johnson) line the upper part of at least two walls, and political posters also catch your eye. Bradley King’s lighting helps illuminate the pizzazz.
When you enter, even before the show proper begins, familiar old pop tunes blare as cast members, wearing outrageous costumes (one inside an inflated dinosaur outfit), carry on only a few feet away. Especially noteworthy is long and lean drag queen Sawyer Smith energetically kicking those endless legs about and doing splits as per Darrell Grand Moultrie’s choreography. A three-piece band provides the music. The atmosphere is “Pahtee!”
The show itself is a raucous paean to the actual 1992 presidential run of Terence Alan Smith, a gay, African-American club performer, Chicago-born but Detroit-raised, who adopted the drag persona of Joan Jett Blakk. Backed by activist groups like Queer Nation, he ran, first against Richard Daly in the 1991 race for mayor of Chicago, and then in 1992 against George Bush and Bill Clinton for POTUS. (He ran again in 1996 and for mayor of San Francisco in 1999.)
Blakk’s 1992 stunt campaign, under the slogan “Lick Bush in ’92,” was a strategic form of political activism based on challenging the establishment through satire, drag, and theatricality to draw attention to LGBTQ rights and the AIDS crisis. For example, in the central scene, he manages to reach the floor of the 1992 Democratic Convention, wearing a dress replete with American flags. There’s also a bit where Sawyer Smith, bedecked in a simulacrum of Marilyn Monroe’s famous gown, sings “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Ari Fulton’s drag-inspired costumes are appropriately fabulous, and Ashley Wise’s hair and wig designs add to the fun.
Ato Blankson-Wood, portraying the effusive Blakk, was a last-minute replacement for Wayne Brady, who had to step down because of a medical issue. This delayed the opening, but, as often in such cases, Blankson-Wood, down to the prosthetic he wears to replicate Blakk’s cracked front teeth, has all his chops to play a candidate who asked, “We’ve had bad actors for president—why not a great drag queen?” (When the show was born in 2019 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, McRaney himself was in the lead.)
Ms. Blakk is an episodic, over-the-top mingling of fact and fantasy, played with 400 hp of energy by a company of six, four of them (Smith, Nic Ashe, Kelvin Moon Low, and Adina Verson, the sole female) constantly changing costumes and genders to enact multiple characters. Gideon Glick plays Mark, the man who saw the publicity value in the candidacy; a fiery community organizer, he’s determined to fight for AIDS support after watching his lover suffer from the disease.
The subject of a Black drag queen running for president in 1992 allows the show to look back on a moment in political history already treated many times in other plays but not through such an unexpected lens. It’s historically fascinating, and well performed but, dramatically, one-note. The familiar music, from Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” to David Bowie’s “Starman” (performed in fully sequined Bowie regalia by Smith) to Queen’s “The Show Must Go On,” is appealing, helping to celebrate the protagonist without going too deeply into background issues, although a few get briefly aired. One arises when the question is raised whether political clowning is helpful to or harms the cause by trivializing it. Otherwise, exuberance takes precedence over depth.
What once was subversive and dangerous, of course, has lost its edge. To a non-gay spectator in 2026 the show is an entertaining history lesson delivered to an audience already on its side. Ms. Blakk for President takes an extraordinary episode of American political history and turns it, not into compelling drama, but into 105 minutes of well-done, good-hearted fun.
At the Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th Street, NYC, now through November 29. Please visit Ms. Blakk for President.
Photos by Carol Rosegg.
Headline photo: Adina Verson, Gideon Glick, Nic Ashe, Ato Blankson-Wood, and Sawyer Smith.
