Pearls Over Shanghai
Photo by Bud Lee
* Pearls * Over * Shanghai * – For the San Franciscans who have been around this end of the woods since the late 1960’s, these words swirl way back to shimmering days of satin and velvet and studs, to colorful head dresses strolling along Haight-Ashbury. They echo drum beats and jingling endless trinkets. They carry whiffs of smokes and burning incense hovering over Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park.
November 20, 1970 was a big deal day at the Palace theater, at the heart of North Beach, San Francisco. It marked the debut of Pearls Over Shanghai, performed by the Cockettes. Gay and straight, all flocked to witness the gender-bending, sexual-freeing, norm-defying, outrageous, outlandish extravaganza.
Photo by Bud Lee
The troupe was looking for a name with a “rockettes” ring to it. Under the circumstances, “Cockettes” made for a natural pick. They were the drug and drag dandies of the 1970’s. The Cockettes took drag queen coquetry up a notch. They strode high, down Haight Street, like proud peacocks, shopping for period clothing and fantasy articles at thrift stores. They were the beaus and divas once upon a time, when Lenin-romantic communes thrived and money-rid social networks flourished in this city.
The Cockettes were “probably the most popular and most photographed group on the West Coast at the time,” says Rumi Missabu, who stars as Madame Gin Sling in the current production, 40 years after his performance with the original cast. “All you had to do back then was to get your drag together, be recruited … and you’re in the show,” he says. Rumi is now working with a new generation of performers, trying to keep the spirit of his former cast mates alive. “The only wrong thing about the young ones is that…I’m not one of them…” he adds with a chuckle.
Photo by Ingeborg Gerdes
The Cockettes were big on flamboyant parodies of show tunes; lavish productions of psychedelic anarchy, chaotic exuberance and LSD-induced sensual sensation. Pearls was their first (fairly) structured scripted show. Link Martin wrote the lyrics & play and Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn composed & played the music. The show quickly became a runaway hit, telling the unleashed tale of white slavery set in 1930s sin-soaked Old Shanghai.
Pearls Over Shanghai is a comic mock-operetta spitted with wit by Link Martin’s sharp tongue and intrigue of the Orient. Martin’s edgy words and Scrumbly’s pumping tunes paint a colorful picture of singing sailors, cynical hookers, gangland slave-trade czars, and henchmen, all jingled in an absurd sensibility-abused mash of drag, Opium, and merriment that so magnificently earns its renowned title: Theater of the Ridiculous.
When the show ends, you realize it’s just beginning. The loony sarcastic lyrics, the overdose gloss & glitter will walk home with you and crash on your sofa for the next month. Petrushka’s vibrating vocals will spill and scatter, like pearls,…
all over Shanghai…
Photo by Kara Emry
