Varla Jean Merman has been on television, on Broadway, and, she says, on welfare. She’s been on the front page of the New York Times and, for 35 years, on a cocktail of prescription drugs. She’s performed in New York and New Orleans, and it’s her 27th summer on the stage in Provincetown. Her new show, “The Errors Tour” at the Crown & Anchor, is a retrospective of this illustrious career, Cheez Whiz and all.
“The Errors Tour” is, of course, a play on Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour.” If you don’t know what that is, bless your heart. You’re a gorgeous naïf, a rare gem, and I’m sorry to corrupt you: “The Eras Tour” is Swift’s globe-trotting concert, which serves as a monument to her discography, guiding audiences through her 11 albums in three sparkly hours. With the world tour, Swift graduated from famous to ubiquitous — as New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka put it, “It’s not that Swift is all we talk about; it’s that anything we talk about bends back toward her, stretching the boundaries of logic.”
Swift’s tour often comes across as self-congratulatory and myopic: the most interesting thing to Taylor Swift is the great success that is Taylor Swift. Merman’s “Errors Tour” takes a different, self-deprecating tack: it uses Merman’s career as a synecdoche for the occupational hazards of the drag industry writ large, from Gorilla Glue burns to perennial rivalries to slipping on a Tic Tac to friends lost too soon. It’s an emotional roller coaster — as raunchy as it is vulnerable — that far exceeds its source material.
There are still Taylor references galore. (“She’s a colleague,” Merman quips.) Swift’s album Reputation becomes Merman’s album Constipation. Instead of Swift’s song “22,” which proposes that it’s a perfect night to dance and find love, Merman’s “52” envisions a different evening: “It feels like a stay-in night,” she sings. “I don’t know about you/ But I’m feeling 52.” “You Belong With Me,” written by a young and sensitive Swift, becomes the just as pleading and moving, “I Belong on TV.”
The best Taylor parodies in the show, though, are the costumes. Merman comes out in a bodysuit, a garment preferred by literally no one in the world besides Taylor Swift. Merman’s has a stuffed animal stitched into it: a pink snake that wraps around her right thigh, up her back, down her stomach, and then lands, tongue hissing, at her crotch. Later, she wears a peplum dress the color of newsprint with serif-y headlines splashed over it. In two senses of the word, Merman is in the tabloids.
Speaking of the press, Merman really has been on the front page of the Times. “Not the front page of the arts section,” she says. “The front page of the front page of the front page.” In 2011, Merman starred alongside Leslie Jordan in the off-Broadway musical Lucky Guy. It closed after 10 days. “A long week,” Merman says. The Times ran a story titled “Lucky Guy? Not. Inside the Show’s Financial Wreckage.” The story appeared just above an ad for The Book of Mormon, which opened at the same time as Merman’s show, and, she grits her teeth, is still running today. Bravo to the layout team.
“Who cares?” Jordan told Merman when she called to commiserate. “We’re on the cover!” The most heartrending part of the show is Merman’s song to her late friend: Jordan, a comedian who became an internet sensation during the pandemic for his Southern charm and 4-foot, 11-inch spriteliness, died in 2022 of cardiac arrest. Merman sings Swift’s “Enchanted” — not a parody, but the sincere original, a plaintive yet hopeful ballad about meeting someone and everything falling into place — while a montage of photos of Jordan and Merman plays. The height difference between the two feels like a physical manifestation of their comedic dynamic.
“I’m wonderstruck,” Merman sings, “blushing all the way home.” Swift wrote the song about a romantic interest, but there’s something about Merman singing it for her friend that gutted me — these are the relationships we don’t structure our lives around, but we should, because they make us. We should more regularly be infatuated with our friends, enchanted even.
In the past 15 years, drag has undergone a sea change. Television has turned the practice from esoteric to mainstream. Everyone and their cousin watches RuPaul’s Drag Race. Whereas drag used to be scrappy, glitz and glam at the dime store, Hollywood has made it glitz and glam on Melrose Avenue. During one number, Merman gets into it with RuPaul — airing out dirty laundry onstage, being, of course, the most Taylor Swift thing one could do. Whereas Swift’s rivalries can sometimes feel petty and contrived, Merman’s discussion of RuPaul feels considered, less about any one person, and more about the rearranged guts of the drag industry, the itchy scalp underneath the wig.
She’s a Colleague
The event: ‘The Errors Tour’ with Varla Jean Merman
The time: Tuesday through Saturday, 8:30 p.m., through Sept. 13
The place: Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $40 at onlyatthecrown.com
