Monsoon season: Jinkx Monsoon – two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner and Broadway star – has taken Britain by storm this summer. Next, she will take on the title role in Oh, Mary!, the smash-hit comedy from former Tatler cover star Cole Escola
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The stars are aligning for Jinkx Monsoon. Quite literally. Zooming in from her new base in London, she is basking in the aftereffects of the solar eclipse, one of three, she tells me, coinciding with the ‘Lion’s Gate Portal’, or the cosmic alignment of the sun in Leo, the star Sirius, and the Earth. ‘So we’re entering a point of transition and reformation: Things are going to be broken down and built back up again,’ she says, with a voice like syrup if syrup could cackle. ‘And I’ve been waiting for that, for f***’s sake.’
It’s true, she’s earned a break. This summer, ‘Monsoon Season’ has come to Britain. Jinkx, perhaps once best known to UK audiences for winning RuPaul’s Drag Race not once but twice, has taken theatreland by storm with her performance as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow (‘the talk of the town,’ said critics). Her ‘Speaking of Witch’ tour followed, taking her up and down the country with a ‘wonderfully strange’ blend of stand-up and cabaret. Before flying over, she made her Broadway debut in Chicago (‘goosebump-producing’), starred in Little Shop of Horrors (‘an Audrey for the ages’) and Pirates! The Penzance Musical (‘canonised as one of the all-time comedy greats’), and performed at Carnegie Hall. Now, she’s following in the footsteps of former Tatler cover star Cole Escola on the West End in Oh, Mary, a role she has already played in New York. Twice.‘For f***’s sake,’ indeed.
‘I get tired, of course,’ she says of her remarkable resumé since 2023. ‘But the world feels really screwed up right now, and the only time that I know I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing to try to help anything is when I’m on stage. I’ve become kind of a workaholic, and I’m talking to my therapist about it because truly I don’t have a lot of interests outside of my work. It’s like: work, cats, video games, advocacy. I’m pretty simple these days.’
It doesn’t hurt that she’s having the time of her life. ‘Part of why I’m a workaholic is because my work is very, very fun to me,’ she says. As a drag artist, she’s as likely to do plays as she is to write and tour new standup material or new music, and each year she has a holiday production with friend and frequent collaborator, BenDeLaCreme. But the ability to work with such variety has been hard-earned. ‘I’ve had tunnel vision for a long time now, because this has always been what I wanted to do. I’ve worked a long time in my career to incrementally make my steps toward the kind of theatre and work that I get to do now.’