The Pokeys Shows:
Defining Drag in the Eighties
An interview with Terri Tinsel, performer and producer with Pokeys.
During the eighties, the crowds were lining up at the Prince of Wales in St Kilda for the sunday night theatre at Pokeys. More than just drag shows, the attractions at Pokeys played an integral part in the awakening of gay culture and gay perspective in Melbourne.
Just as “voguing” at the New York gay balls in the sixties defined fashions and identities in the following decades, so the first Pokeys event: Women of the Eighties, described perfectly the awakening of the gay culture in Melbourne. The shows presented at Pokeys explored the politics of gender and gay identity; neatly reclaiming a theatrical tradition from the times of Shakepeare, and redefining the symbolic role of the gorgeous female impersonator.
Drag shows had always meant long catwalks, and performers in sequined gowns, miming records played through underpowered public address systems. The Pokeys shows had production values that were usually only seen in mainstream theatre, with special effects and sound systems that would have been the envy of any stage producer at the time.
The shows were technically complex and politically challenging, a far cry from the Vaudeville tradition of beautiful boys in dresses, such as the Danny La Rue shows, or the Les Girls All Male Review that was such a hit with the suburban crowds throughout the nineteen seventies.
Almost half a million paying customers saw the Pokeys shows over the years they were produced. Terri Sinclair, better known to the Pokeys crowd as Terri Tinsel was on stage for the first show and was there when the lights went out on the last of the Blue Chip Pokeys productions on Australia Day 1992.
Terri helped to create the magic that was Pokeys and she was vitally involved with the production of the shows, creating storylines and drama that questioned our assumptions about our everyday lives while subtly affirming the role of gay culture in the mainstream entertainment industry.
Terri, how did it all start? There’s so much fantasy; tall tales and true about Pokeys.
Pokeys actually started out as a drag show that never really worked; it was mainly done for a straight audience, like the old Les Girls crowds, then things just developed from there as we worked out who our audience was, and what we wanted to do as performers. It was actually a slight rip off of a club in Taylor Square in Sydney called Capriccios which in the early seventies got away from the traditional “tits and feathers” drag shows and started to have shows that were a little more involved and political, about gay life and everything.
Did you consciously create the spectacular breaks from that traditional Danny La Rue type of show or did the special Pokeys magic just evolve.
Well, they didn’t always have that magic. They started out just like any other drag show.
`Women of the Eighties’ wasn’t just any other drag show though.
Yes, well, that was the one that did it for us.
Why, what was so special about that show?
You see, up to that time drag shows were modelled on the traditional Female Impersonator sort of show; “Tits, Bums and Feathers” and things like that, and of course we were performing this sort of show to gay people and I thought at the time I was doing it, even though it was going over with the crowds, that the gay community, and the performers deserved something more, and I started to formulate in my mind the kind of thing of that I really wanted to see happen.
What was that?
All the traditional shows had been about men dressing up as women and doing very feminine things, I know there’s a fascination with that, but I felt that I could give the audience more. I’d discussed this with Jan, Jan Hillier was the owner of Pokeys, and I said that I had this idea in my head about doing a show along the lines of the movie Alien. I’d been very heavily influenced by all its techniques, and the style and everything, and I told Jan that I wanted to do something along those lines. Jan was of the old school of drag shows, but luckily she said that I could go ahead and try if I wished.
I take it Jan Hillier took some convincing about this idea.
I think she was just a little worried that it wouldn’t work because she was so used to working with the tits and bums and feathers sort of show.
What was so different from the old shows.
Well, we decided we’d have reptilian costumes made, about the only thing feminine about our look was our faces, and of course our busts, everything else was slimy and green and revolting, with head dresses and bodies with long tails and hands with long claws. Quite revolting really. We used to put gelatine on use every night to make us slippery and slimy. It was rather horrible really but it worked. Also we had Kabuki makeup which is taken for granted these days, but you never ever saw it then. The makeup started on the bridge of your nose and went right up past your eyebrows. Your blusher was blue and your lips were blue. Jan was fainting. She’d never seen anything like it. I’d also been very impressed with the film Beastmaster and I felt there was something very sexual about men not showing their faces, and with legs all covered up with spikes and G Strings and so on, and Laurie Lane made some wonderful costumes in leather for the show. They proved to be quite a hit judging by the number of photos that were taken.
The Pokeys sound system was quite impressive, how did that come about?
Opening night was coming and I was afraid I’d taken on too much. I was afraid something horrible would happen. Jan was petrified but she did trust me, and I went to her and said that I thought the sound system wasn’t adequate to take this type of show to a gay audience. Thankfully Jan knows quality and so we ended up with big bass bins and things which we all take for granted at venues now, like tweeters and big top end, but at that time you wouldn’t expect anything like that at a drag show. Also it was the first show we’d produced in stereo which gave us nightmares as well, but we were learning constantly as we went along. It was the first time we’d used a heavy overture as well, from the Star Trek motion picture I think.
It was a very complex sound track you created for the show.
You can do things in five minutes these days on tape and with editing suites but we had to resort to cutting six track tape with a razor blade on a breadboard to get the soundtracks we wanted, and we had to overlay sound effect over sound effect. Klaxon Horns going off, steam compression, explosions, everything just overlay upon overlay. It was just a nightmare. One production number might take three weeks of editing to make and then you might decide that it wouldn’t work.
Tell us about the opening night.
We had a set made that gave the appearance of an airlock opening up. We used back lighting, and key lighting, which was ahead of its time too, no-one lit people like that at that time. There were no female voices happening, Jan was terrified about that, there were only men; Prince [1999] was playing. The overture finished then with a warning Klaxon sound, like ambulance horns, the airlock opened up to compression steam, all sorts of pyrotechnics, bombs went off, and we all stepped out of the airlock in slow motion. We had fans at the back and two technical crew on either side threw confetti and shredded paper through with us so it looked like the airlock was exploding.
Opening night there were seven hundred people and the next week there were two thousand, including the Truth newspaper trying to take photographs, so that’s basically how the Pokeys Format was started.
The later shows seemed to get even more involved and complex.
Yes, they were involved, probably too involved really. I think perhaps I started to lose the plot a bit.
`American Dreams’ particularly.
Yes, I’d just come back from America and I’d seen the productions in Las Vegas and I thought I could try and bring a bit of that sort of production to Pokeys. Jan was horrified again when I told her about it. Nothing was done without consulting Jan. Anyway we had things like TV monitors to find our marks and staging, which didn’t work because you ended up performing to the video and not to the audience. Later we moved the monitors up the back for the audience to look at and by turning them a bit we were able to use them to find our marks, but you’re right it was a very complicated show, but very successful.
The lighting was always a feature of the shows. Especially that finale in `American Dreams’.
You see there was no twelve volt technology, everything was quite primitive and when the buildings lit up there was 240 volts going through them, and of course there were cords everywhere that we were all tripping over. So that if you did a routine spinning around one way, you’d have to reverse it otherwise all the chords would tangle. I said to Jan at one of the rehearsals “did you know that one of the Busby Berkeley Girls was electrocuted doing one of these type of numbers”. Well, she practically fainted; Jan was a stickler for safety and so she had safety cutout switches installed so that if anything ever went wrong everything would close down before we were hurt.
How many people were involved in Pokeys?
Besides the cast, perhaps fifty people made Pokeys work. Everything was done for us. There was us on stage, then we had the spotlight person, lights person, the choreographer, the person who produced your image, the person who did your costumes, the person who did your hair, the person who did your makeup, the person that dressed you, the person who co-ordinated you, then you had the staging people, so it was a sort of pyramid of people, all producing the finished product. It was like a miniature Hollywood; a dream factory.
In what way?
Lighting, costumes, makeup, how we looked, how we acted, how we performed. If you couldn’t do dance steps or something it was corrected by lighting, for instance each performer had her own lighting design; they used pale mauve for me, Rene was always apricot and Michelle’s was magenta blue, or the choreography was altered to make you look better. If something didn’t look good on you your hair was altered, or your makeup restyled. What you saw on stage was not us really. We were actually products, but a very exquisite product may I say. Actually I’m very proud of it and I think that everyone else that worked at Pokeys is very proud of the shows and illusions that were produced there.
It wasn’t all drama surely, what of the fun times.
There were fun things and there were disastrous things happening all the time. Paul fell over once in the finale in his Empire State costume and he rolled around like a turtle and we couldn’t get him up again. I fell off the monolith and injured myself rather badly. A very freaky poltergeist thing happened to Rene. She was late for the overture one night and she raced past the mirror and the booming sound from the overture music smashed the mirror and a sliver of glass went straight into her ankle.
In the end the show comes down to the people on stage doesn’t it?
The pressure on the Pokeys girls was tremendous. I don’t think people realised at the time how much pressure we had. I mean all the dressers and the stage crew were so terrified of anything going wrong, that the show would fail and they’d be sliced raw for not making us perform. They’d be ripping our wigs off us and sticking us into our costumes. There was this one number. I remember I couldn’t stop crying, I was so emotionally strung out, I was in front of the mirror, the tears were rolling out of my eyes and the dressers were dressing me for the next number, and they were blotting my eyes all the time as they were dressing me and then I was just sort of pushed out onto stage, and I was still crying. All the girls had similar sorts of thing happen.
There was a very macabre show you produced called “The Guardian”.
The Guardian was another rags to riches nightmare type story. The interesting thing about it though was that it started off being hated and ended up being very popular. In other words we started off with a minimal audience and by the time it finished its run it had a great following, so much so that the audience was actually miming the dialogue with us. It was actually quite funny sometimes, and you’d have to think of other things so you wouldn’t crack up because it was meant to be a serious interpretation of AIDS and other psychological things thrown in. It also had production complications because we were progressing all the time. We went to Dolby Surround Sound, that’s the type of sound they use in picture theatres, and the sound track was laid down about two months before the show went into production and we had all sorts of problems with losing the sound quality during the programming and editing. Also we couldn’t change the soundtrack after it was completed so we had to follow the number sequence regardless, which caused us a few problems.
What sort of problems.
Things just went wrong. Michelle and Rene left the show. Rene was cast opposite our Devil character as the Evil Queen, a sort of Disney type character, and we didn’t have anyone to replace her until Pauline Manhunter joined, who was excellent in the role by the way. I ended up with Michelle’s number, which was “People”, because it was in the soundtrack and we couldn’t take it out, and so I’d be on stage as `Dorothy’ and then run off, come back for a spot number, then race off and get back into `Dorothy’ again. I think that confused the audience, and the framework and focus of the show seemed to be lost.
Still even with all those problems it seems that “The Guardian” was the jewel in the crown of the Pokeys shows.
Many theatrical and artistic people have said that it is their most preferred show, yet a lot of other people hated it. I thought our shows were art forms, not necessarily drag shows, even though we were showing off the latest looks and fashions.
So in the end what happened to Pokeys.
We were heading towards the nineties, and unfortunately the recession was heading towards us. The shows were just too expensive. After The Guardian we had another two shows: Flash Trash I and Flash Trash II. Flash Trash II was the one that really failed and finished it for us. I do feel though that if times hadn’t been so tough we would have gone on.
Do you think the Pokeys style of production will be seen again.
There could well be but what people don’t realise is that it was unbelievably expensive to produce the Pokeys shows. Each show was collecting what they call “trash debt”, that means that one show wasn’t paying itself off before another show was running. They weren’t making profits and so no-one was making money. Most people won’t believe this but basically the girls got hardly anything for their work, and also the owners made next to nothing out of it either. The people who reaped the rewards were the audience but they just weren’t aware of it.
Reprinted with permission of the author who retains copyright on this article.
All images and content
on www.amandamonroe.com
is copyright 2024