Product ReviewsThe Lady In Question is Charles Busch (DVD, 2006)

Charles Busch Doing More Than Drag

This is the documentary to see! It's the amazing career story of a male performer who started out doing shows with "disenfranchised" and ever so talented actors avante in live back street allies of NYC, more or less. No bathrooms "back stage," as if there was a stage in the beginning.

Busch built an acting troupe at an East Side rough side of NYC hole in the wall, then in the 1960's. Held spaghetti and water suppers to earn $55,000.00 to get into a real theater with a toilet(!) bringing more than simple drag comedy to huge audiences who needed comic relief at the height of the Reagan ignorance years of the HIV+-AIDS crisis, when everyone was dying from the disease, including a woman and a man in Busch's acting troupe.

Busch's sisters credit his father for playing opera constantly; his Aunt Lillian for getting him into a performing arts school after his mother died when he was 7yo. His partner of 16 years credits Charles for truly being a dedicated performer who resisted drugs, unsafe sex, and a near fatal heart aorta tear for the consistent progress of his fabulous career.

When drag queens were being searched, harassed, and busted by NYC police, Busch was a man acting as a woman, writing hysterically campish plays, and keeping the company of a cast that became a family.

Busch has to his credit a Broadway hit that Linda Lavin starred in as both of his sisters, about his funky Jewish family quirks. A Hollywood movie that is a success, "Die Mommie Die," of which he is the star.

This story of how Charles Busch made it from acting in a near "crack shack" to Broadway and Hollywood shows a good hour, at least, of the raw footage of the "crack shack" plays the first troupe did that made the East Side of NYC begin to take on its now infamous history as the raw artsy cultural center of the city.

Plus, he gives you no choice but to have to admit--Charles Busch as a leading lady actress is simply elegant, gorgeous, and one of the best entertainers in nontraditional comedy then, in-between, and now.

One way to look at it is that Patrick Swayze seems to have been attempting to play Charles Busch in "Too Wong Foo . . .".The documentary is the best advertisement for becoming a Charles Busch fan if there ever was one. In much of the film we hear and see Busch as a man talking to us about his career.

Seeing him "undressed" or rather, out of women's attire, character, and role serves to punctuate what a legendary gender-crossing actor he has become.Read full review...