by Steve Desroches
There are some evil queens in Provincetown, but Aurora Sexton is the rottenest of them all. Her mirror on the wall is screaming “Yassss, queen! You are the most evil in all the land…unless that opera singing girl comes back, but until then, it’s you, queen!” In devilish seriousness the mirror, mirror on the wall actually informs this evil queen that she is not the fairest in all the land and that face in the magic mirror is none other than drag superstar Raja making a cameo in Sexton’s newest incantation Hexed, a drag show that takes us deep into the dark side of fairy tales.
Inspired by both the 1959 Disney animated classic Sleeping Beauty and the 2014 live action film Maleficent, Sexton’s summer show is a multimedia spectacular with a queer bent as she revels in how fun being bad can be. The former Miss Gay USofA knows a thing or two about wearing a crown, but in Hexed it’s not a bouquet of roses and a side-to-side wave she’s serving. Rather she’s cast a spell on the audience as she’s got poison apples and a wicked wit to spare in this dark comedy.
Sexton made a splash last summer with her politically charged Let Them Eat Cake! Diary of a First Lady. While Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway do not appear in this show about rotten villains, they do bear a striking resemblance to a couple of the hobgoblins in the supporting cast, played in Hexed by a cast of superbly constructed and operated puppets (think Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal in a gay bar). And while it’s a live stage show, Sexton uses video work both as added special effects when casting spells and as a narrative device creating a mixture of mini-film festival as well as live action interacting with a world of drag fantasia.
Provincetown offers a lot of unique performance fare giving performers room and support to take risks and experiment. It’s a hallmark of the town. Provincetown is the incubator for a lot of new ideas, particularly in drag performance. Sexton is a queen to watch as after touring the country as Miss Gay USofA in 2016 she surveyed drag scenes in a variety of locales and has positioned herself alongside those drag performers eager to take advantage of the unprecedented attention and resources available to drag queens now. Hexed clearly comes from a mind bursting with innovation and creativity as it’s as unconventional as it is clever. It’s also a lot of fun. Sexton paints and sashays her way through a history of evil sorceresses, queens, and witches, giving the show at times a feeling of riding in an old-school amusement park dark ride with real shivers (her Queen of Hearts is particularly chilling). But above all else, Sexton serves one fierce look after another as this queen makes being wicked look gorgeous.
Aurora Sexton presents Hexed at the Post Office Cabaret, 303 Commercial St., Provincetown, Tuesday through Sunday at 7 p.m. through July 21. Tickets ($30/$40) are available at the box office and online at postofficecabaret.com. For more information call 508.487.0006.
