Early on in their Thursday night (Dec. 5) performance at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn, NY, drag stars Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme told their crowd of a few thousand fans that they intended to do things a little differently this year.
The pair have been performing together in various iterations of their annual Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show for the last seven years, with each successive variety performance becoming more involved, plot-driven and deeply meta than the last. Their 2023 show, as they point out during this year’s production, revolved around their show itself turning on and trying to kill them.
So for 2024, the dynamic duo told their audience that they just wanted to keep things straightforward — some lighthearted fun, some good laughs, and that winning parody combination of “a pop song you heard on the radio all year, plus Christmas,” as DeLa put it. Nothing fancy, just an easy, simple holiday show.
What ensued, while it was of course not at all what the duo described at the outset of their performance, proved exactly why these Drag Race alumni make such a perfect pair on the stage. Across two acts and two hours, Jinkx and DeLa managed to not only encapsulate the manic brilliance of their now-historic run together, but to also deftly (and often bluntly) address and audience still reeling from the political chaos of the last month.
Fans of the The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show will have plenty to celebrate with this year’s iteration, as the pair keep on the tradition of building a loose narrative around a Christmas-themed concept. This time around, Jinkx delightfully informs the audience that they’re doing a Nutcracker riff (or “nut-gobbler,” as DeLa accidentally calls it), as the pair get shrunk down to toy-size and participate in the well-loved Christmas ballet. It’s a welcome shift, seeing the usually-grinchy Jinkx getting excited for the holdiays, while the often-optimistic DeLa gets her opportunity to make fun of the centuries-old ballet at every given opportunity.
The song parodies are also back, and arguably better than ever. Jinkx and DeLa once again meld their own original songs with new versions of holiday classics, American standards and a heaping helping of 2024 pop hits. A now Broadway-minted Monsoon flexes both her musical and comedic chops on the early standout performance of “Secular” (to the tune of Wicked‘s “Popular”) as she delights in leaving the more Judeo-Christian aspects of the season behind. Meanwhile DeLa stuns with a rendition of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” that sees the star crooning about missing snow in a globally warmed winter of unseasonably warm weather — although, when it happens this much, we really shouldn’t call it “unseasonable,” as DeLa points out.
The standout running gag from the show, though, comes in the form of the pair desperately trying to find an appropriately funny (and Christmas-y) Chappell Roan parody. DeLa tries her best early on — conjuring up clunky visions of a “Red Reindeer Place” and attempting to incite a “Femininomenon” in the city of Bethlehem — before Jinkx tells her to just give it up. But the pair finally triumph with their own, double-meta version of Roan’s breakout hit “Hot to Go,” this time singing about the difficulty of coming up with a Chappell parody before settling on spelling out “Hot Coco.”
While the show certainly has plenty of fun songs and hilarious jokes — Jinkx’s ongoing infatuation with and seduction by The Nutcracker had the Brooklyn audience in stitches — the show’s core comes into full focus during it’s second act, when both Jinkx and DeLa partially drop the facade of the show to look at the context they’re performing it in.
In an interview with Billboard back in October, both Jinkx and DeLa expressed their desire to get to the core of our current system of political division, and how those divisions have made the holidays and even harder time of year for everyone, especially in the LGBTQ+ community. “At a hard time of year, a bunch of people get to come together and look at some beautiful visuals, outfits, props and performances from our brilliant cast,” DeLa said at the time.
While I won’t give away the show’s clever plot, I can say that the Act II breakdown from Jinkx & DeLa landed exactly where they wanted it to. As the pair use the structure of their show itself to process Donald Trump’s re-election in November, they dig even deeper to get to the emotional crux that the audience at the Kings Theater was feeling. When Jinkx woefully declared that she — like many of us — was “so tired of caring,” DeLa delivered the needed reality check: “I’m tired of people not caring.”
The fabulous costume design and gifted background performers helped elevate 2024’s Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show to new heights, that’s for certain. But the thing that always made this zany show work is what worked best for the 150th time on Thursday night; a pair of best friends and talented performers who know exactly how to balance the real with the delightfully absurd.
