This town has been really good in the past couple of years at bringing its recent history -- especially queer history -- to the forefront in engaging ways through the arts. The recent documentary We Were Here, for example, is built on extensive interviews with a handful of people who were at the center of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 1980s. A group called Theatre Shark has resurrected the Pulitzer-winning play Angels in America, which was produced in the same era. Theater group Thrillpeddlers, reaching back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, had a nearly two-year run with Pearls Over Shanghai, a musical penned and performed by the gender-bending and sexuality-celebrating troupe the Cockettes.
With Vice Palace, Thrillpeddlers continues to reinterpret the work of the Cockettes and show why the themes are as relevant (and, in this case, fun) today as they were back then. It has enlisted the help of former Cockette Scrumbly Koldewyn, who also helped with Pearls. SF Weekly theater critic Chris Jensen calls it "a good-natured evening of minimally polished, unapologetically trashy entertainment."
Read the rest of Jensen's review of Vice Palace in our calendar section.
Vice Palace continues through July 31 at the Hypnodrome, 575 10th St. (at Bryant). Admission is $30-$35.
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