Blue lights cover the stage of the cabaret room at the Crown & Anchor. A voice seeps through the narrow opening in the curtain: “Another openin’, another show,” sings Delta Miles in her best Judy Garland impersonation.
The curtains part. Miles poses in silhouette with her microphone skyward. She sings; the lights change from blue to gold. She twirls the microphone cord around her shoulder. She’s in a short-haired wig and a crimson-and-silver striped shirt with cuffed sleeves and a white collar.
She toasts the audience with a faux cocktail — Miles is sober, but Judy certainly was not. She does an amazing job at faking drunkenness, her voice a little swerved. She sings and pauses. The pauses are masterful, pregnant with meaning.
She relaxes into the performance and handles accidents and missteps seamlessly. Despite what happens during any given performance of “Delta Miles Is Judy Live,” on the stage every Wednesday through Sept. 18, Miles stays sharp.
Miles weaves together songs, stand-up, and tipsy storytelling. During one anecdote, a few buttons on her shirt pop out mid-sentence. She pauses to rebutton. She’s both doing it for herself and pointing it out to her audience. Here, mistakes and mishaps are a shared experience.
Miles has got her numbers down. Like a gourmet chef, she plates each lyric perfectly in front of her audience and bows at the end.
In “Come Rain or Come Shine,” Miles steps offstage before the music ends, abandoning her audience early. We’re left with an eerie moment — this Judy, like the real one, who died from a drug overdose in 1969 at age 47, is gone before her time.
“I know I’m not 75 pounds, but I want to celebrate this woman,” says John Pirroni, the man behind Miles, sitting at a picnic table in the courtyard of the Moffat House, where Crown & Anchor staff live. He has cobalt blue nails and Army green Birkenstock sandals on. Around his neck is a chain from Full Kit that matches his gold earrings.
“I do squats before shows backstage, like 25, to warm up my body,” he says. “The makeup process is two and a half hours, so I listen to Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. I allow myself to sit and enjoy. I’ll start slowly talking like Judy.”
Pirroni performed for the first time in drag in 2010 at Machine, a now shuttered gay club in Boston. “When I was a kid, I said I was going to be a drag queen and work with Varla Jean Merman,” he recalls.
There were certain drag queens Pirroni watched online when YouTube was created: Varla Jean, Randy Robert, Coco Peru, and Edie. “It was like looking at sugar cereal in the supermarket,” he says. “It was all I wanted. My eyes would glaze watching these performers.”
Pirroni moved to Provincetown to perform in 2021. “I wanted to throw my head in some wigs and run around town like a banshee,” he says.
Pirroni was born in Cambridge in 1986. He grew up in Somerville and went to Middlesex Community College but dropped out once performing took over. “Theater was always an extracurricular activity, something you did as a hobby,” he says. “Growing up, I thought you had to get a job and work in an office. I never focused on theater as a career choice. I always did it on the side, but it somehow turned into my career.”
Pirroni learned performance from friends and by simply going out there and doing it. “I’m so Italian in that regard,” he says. “I’m a tradesman: I learn by doing. I paint shoes, I make wigs, I make costumes, I use my body. The best training for me has been on the ground.”
Delta Miles is an alter ego. “She’s not as much a character as an embodiment of all the things I struggle with,” Pirroni says. “She breaks limiting beliefs I have about myself. All the things I think I’m not capable of, Delta is capable of.
“I, as John Pirroni, would say I’m too tall and weigh far too much and have too low a voice to do a Judy Garland impersonation,” he continues. “Judy Garland was four-foot-11 and weighed maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. Delta doesn’t care about any of that. Delta believes she can celebrate this human being and not feel ashamed or embarrassed by it.”
During every show, Pirroni plays a clip from a Judy Garland interview: “I really like my audiences,” says Garland. “I have great respect for them. I think anyone who would sit in a chair and look at one person and pay money to see that — that’s a marriage between the audience and myself.”
“So much of Judy Garland is put out there in the world, but it isn’t always about her ability to perform,” Pirroni says. He notes that, even today, the media tend to emphasize Garland’s dark side — her drug use, her alcoholism, her sloppiness — and her talent lives under this shadow. “But in my show, I want to celebrate how great she made people feel,” he says.
“We all focus on the way people behave when they’re embarrassing instead of the way people make others feel when they’re at their best,” he says. “Judy Garland makes me feel captivated when I listen to or watch her.”
Marrying the Audience
The event: ‘Delta Miles Is Judy Live’
The time: Wednesdays through Sept. 18 at 9 p.m.
The place: Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $35 and $45 at onlyatthecrown.com
