If these are strange times in America, they are particularly strange for Jinkx Monsoon, the 38-year-old actor, singer and drag artist who, since winning RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013 and Drag Race All Stars in 2022, has become a huge breakout star. Monsoon, who has the white-lead-and-vinegar glamour of a 1930s movie star, has appeared on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall and in countless viral clips from Drag Race – and in other words is widely well known. And yet, she says, when she walks down the street in certain American cities, it is in a state of “not knowing if someone’s going to recognise me and be excited to see me, or recognise something about me and be hostile. It’s a really interesting dichotomy.” She lets out a huge laugh. “But it also keeps me humble, I gotta say.”
We are backstage at the Soho Theatre in London’s Walthamstow, where Monsoon is shortly to appear in End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s musical drama about Judy Garland, set in 1969 in the last months of the icon’s life. It’s a great role for Monsoon, whose impersonation of Garland on Drag Race was so spot-on the clips are still doing the rounds (although for my money, her Little Edie Beale was even better and funnier). But the show isn’t being played for laughs. Monsoon, who had a stellar run as Mama Morton in the Broadway production of Chicago three years ago, is increasingly leaning towards dramatic roles and, like Garland herself, is comfortable with the tragi-comic. “She’s a pillar, and an institution,” she says of Garland, in whom she became interested after watching the Wizard of Oz on repeat as a child. And because, she laughs, “my ex was obsessed with her”.
Of course. We’re all obsessed with her, even if Monsoon was aware of taking a risk by choosing Garland to impersonate on Drag Race – “an antiquated character to younger audiences”. (She also did Natasha Lyonne, to great effect.) The fact is, it’s not only Garland whom Monsoon evokes in the show but a whole world of female performers on the Ethel Merman-Elaine Stritch continuum, in which pain and addiction overlap with talent and the other, defining characteristic of these women, which Monsoon identifies as “complete candour”.
Here’s a typical story Monsoon likes to luxuriate in the telling of, that features a famous conversation between Garland and Stritch: “Elaine was saying to Judy, ‘Judy there’s a new show, it’s called Mame, there are two female leads, Vera and Mame. Listen! Vera is a drunk. So I think you play Mame on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and I’ll play Vera and I can drink on those nights, but you have to stay sober. And then when we flip it, I’ll play Mame and you play Vera, and you can drink on those nights. So we only have to be sober every other show. And Judy says” – and here, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up because Monsoon’s impression is so pitch perfect – “‘Elaine; what about matinees?’ And Elaine says, ‘Shit!’” (As it happens, Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury ended up in those roles.)
Monsoon grew up in the early 2000s in Portland, Oregon, in a Catholic family dominated by women. Unusually for that time and milieu, her family were comfortable and supportive of what, back then, was the gender non-conforming boy in their midst. “My whole family were very liberal. The women in my life saw who I was at an early age and told the men in my life: ‘You will accept this kid or you won’t be here.’” She says there was “a lot of addiction, a lot of trauma [in my family], but when it comes to loving each other we’ve got that part down.”
It still took an awfully long time for Monsoon to find a comfortable identity, first in early drag shows as a teen in Portland, and later as a non-binary, trans-femme artist with the stage name Jinkx Monsoon (her legal name is Hera Hoffer). On Broadway, she replaced Cole Escola in their Tony-winning show Oh, Mary!, and is close friends with the star of the London run, Mason Alexander Park. It’s quite extraordinary, she says, “when you’ve been told your whole life that there isn’t room for you, that you’re going to be lucky if you get anything, to be experiencing this kind of abundance.”
All of which dispels the long-held myth that audiences won’t show up for trans or queer performers. Oh, Mary! has been the hottest ticket on Broadway since it opened in 2024. Monsoon’s run in Chicago sent that fading musical’s ticket sales through the roof, so much so that she returned for a second run a year later. And on the earliest evidence, it looks as if End of the Rainbow will repeat the pattern.
“I want people to remember this,” says Monsoon, “the next time someone wonders, ‘Should we cast this person from this marginalised demographic?’ Yes. Do it. People would rather see a fresh perspective than the same thing over and over. All you need to know is that audiences handled it.” She smiles the toothy smile many of us have come to know and love. “Not just that, they loved it, embraced it, came for every show.”
End of the Rainbow is at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, London, from 15 May to 21 June
