Cherry Pop is small town shabby gay bar that looks like it probably has never seen better days. However it is home for the small coterie of drag queens who perform there nightly even though it looks they out number the audience at the best of times. Every night this band of performers are joined by a newbie who has never set foot of a stage before, and is about to have his drag cherry popped.
Tonight’s Cherry (Lars Berge) is a scared looking geek who seems more nervous than usual but that’s because he is concealing a secret that when it is eventually exposed, has all the drag queens screaming in horror. He is ‘straight’ and is there fulfilling a long held ambition with the full knowledge of his fiance who is planning to be in the audience.
This is one of the few quirky plot strands in this oddball campy drama that essentially allows some really wonderful drag queens, including a few Drag Race alumni, to not just perform a number or two, but to show that they can act too. Even if it is as just funny bitchier versions of their regular stage personas.
Kitten Withawhip the club M.C. and mother hen is played by Christopher Caldwell aka Bob The Drag Queen; White Chocolate is played by Matthew Sanderson aka Detox Icunt, but Timothy Wilcots aka Latrice Royale was out a drag playing an annoying member of the audience. The scene stealer however was the show’s aging star Lady Zaza who, recently bereaved, was sublimely funny as the most embittered one of them all: played by Patrick Holt aka Tempest Dujour (whose real day job is a UA Professor).
Cherry Pop, the feature film directing debut of Assaad Yacoub and the writing debut of Nick Landa, is an entertaining romp which will please all drag aficionados and others too who just love hanging out in anonymous seedy bars.
