Becoming Barbra

Written by Barbra Bardot
Co-Produced by Mal Parrott

The Majestic Theatre | September 27, 2025

Reviewed by Rhea Rollman

Becoming Barbra toys playfully with the fourth wall even before the performance begins. As audience members file into the theatre and take their seats, a similar preparatory ritual unfolds on stage, where we witness a drag queen putting on makeup, prepping wigs, preparing to take stage herself. This opening sequence signals to the audience one of the qualities that make this such a successful show: its willingness to be vulnerable, to reveal in an honest way the fraught process of an artist’s development. It reminds us we act on many stages, and of the complex ways our lives themselves can become performative. Above all, it reveals the spirit that makes this performance work so well: an ability to hold playfulness and creative whimsy in delicate tension with deeper, more serious topics. 

Becoming Barbra is the deeply personal, creative and lively story of Barbra Bardot’s journey as a drag performer. Part drag show, part musical theatre, the performance incorporates an impressive range of storytelling techniques (monologues, voice-overs, video, live audience banter) along with a packed repertoire of song and dance. Detailed enough to require an intermission, the story proceeds at a lively pace, shifting from the club scene of downtown Toronto to the swells of the Atlantic Ocean to the bars and classrooms of St. John’s, NL. The musical selections it incorporates range from Shirley Bassey to Cher; Barbra Streisand to Chappell Roan and more. 

The story opens with Bardot’s immersion into drag culture in Toronto, drawing on stills and recordings from those early 2018 performances. In 2020, when the arrival of Covid disrupted everyday life and especially the lives of performers whose stages were shuttered under lockdown, Bardot relocated to Newfoundland. She has family roots here: a grandmother grew up in St. John’s before moving to the mainland, although Bardot’s only prior experience with the place was a summer visit at the age of 8. 

The song “Rattlin’ Barb” tells the story of this journey to her new home. It’s a raucous, drag-infused rendition of the Newfoundland folk anthem Rattlin’ Bog, performed on a boat as Bardot embarks on her journey to the island. The piece is uproarious, performed with dancers mimicking waves on stage. You honestly have not seen Rattlin’ Bog until you’ve seen it performed live by a drag queen with burlesque dancers. 

In St. John’s the story becomes more complex and personal. Bardot is welcomed to the city with open arms by the burgeoning drag community. She doesn’t miss the opportunity to criticize the poor, exploitative working conditions of drag artists here with barbed commentary that has the audience in stitches. One of the ways she, and others, sought to tackle the problem was by opening their own drag bar called Kaleidoscope. 

Here’s where the story gets complicated. Bardot explores the intense highs and lows of the Kaleidoscope experience—the inspirational stories of community-building it generated and the friendships and relationships formed; the exhausting and morally fraught ordeal of trying to maintain the integrity of drag as an art-form while also generating enough revenue to pay $10,000-a-month rent bills. She reflects in a deeply personal way on navigating the egos of a community of artists—her own first and foremost—and on the growing impact of alcohol use on her day-to-day life. 

The alcohol-infused environment of the drag bar takes centre stage in a performance titled “Kaleidoscope Chaos Mix”, a masterful piece that conveys the whirlwind tempest which running a drag bar proved to be. Bardot spins around the stage, performing, taking orders from customers, serving drinks, cleaning the floor, and back on stage again, a relentless cycle, surrounded by other staff and co-owners also dancing their way through the ordeal. Incorporated into this performance, subtly at first, then more and more overtly, is Bardot increasingly taking advantage of access to free alcohol—a shot here, a marguerita there—and the growing impact this has on her ability to do the many jobs that running a bar entails. Inevitably, the mesmerising and brilliantly conceived piece crashes to a halt. 

Kaleidoscope shut its doors in August 2023, and the concluding sequence of the show chronicles Bardot’s efforts to find renewed purpose in the months that followed. Spoiler alert: she does, emerging from this challenging period sober and with a renewed commitment to drag, to art and to the community. 

“Before Barbra was even a thought, I knew I wanted to make a difference,” she reflects in a closing monologue. “I wanted to make a difference for my community.

Written by Barbra Bardot (Jacques St. Pierre), co-produced by Mal Parrott, the production also draws on the talents of burlesque performers Nora Fence (M. Moakler Jessiman) and Holly Rancher (Jenna Slaney), along with drag performer Zena Sophia (Zach Drake) and others. Bardot devotes a touching segment to her romance and subsequent marriage to Jessiman, never missing the opportunity to interrogate audience assumptions about sexuality and gender. 

Musical theatre succeeds best when it deftly weaves a gregarious performative vibe with the intimate and personal. Becoming Barbra offers that delicate balance, delivered in exquisite tension and in such a way that the viewer is swept along on Barbra’s personal journey. If the show aspires to reveal the diversity and versatility of drag, it does that in fitting fashion by even incorporating a drag storytime toward the end. Bardot sits facing the audience (replicating a real life experience at a local school) and reads from Christine Baldacchino’s children’s classic Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.

In their seminal book Decolonize Drag, Kareem Khubchandani (LaWhore Vagistan) calls on the drag community to retain its creative, unorthodox edge, and bind that indelibly with fun and play. They pose the challenge: “What if drag remembered its histories of dissidence? What if drag had permission to move across categories and media? What worlds, more just and beautiful worlds, could drag make possible if it didn’t solely look like what RuPaul and her production team put out?” 

In its own way, Becoming Barbra responds, blending musical forms and traditions, drawing on local folklore, posing arch questions of class, revealing the impact of substance use, and more. This is drag that remains fun and playful, but also takes itself seriously as a form through which to interrogate society, politics and the meaning of art. For a province that prides itself on its deep artistic traditions, we don’t talk enough about the conditions—material, psychological, ethical—under which art is produced here. Becoming Barbra deserves praise for many things, including an ambitious effort to provoke that discussion. 

Becoming Barbra played for one night to a packed house at the Majestic Theatre, but Bardot and her team hope to take the show to other, bigger stages. They should: larger audiences deserve to see the most creative song-and-dance performance of the year, and the conversations it generates about artistic integrity and the rights of artists, about NL society, and about contemporary politics are ones we urgently need to be having. And what better way to have them than with a bit of Cher and ABBA thrown in?

Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and audio producer based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023).