Joey Arias is leaving Las Vegas for Arias with a Twist

The downtown arts complex HERE is still under construction. Rows of lights hang like bats from the ceiling, and set pieces from its inaugural music-theater production, Arias with a Twist, litter the playing space: a foam-board skyline, a gynecological exam table, a kickline of nude puppets with articulated knees. Joey Arias, dressed in black sweats, easily navigates the chaos. The notorious singer and drag artiste—a fixture of Gotham’s demimonde for the past three decades—has been away since 2002. But now he’s back, and HERE is where he belongs.

Leaving town to join the circus is not, as a general rule, considered a move toward respectability. But when the corporate megalith Cirque du Soleil lured Arias to Las Vegas to host its x-rated extravaganza, Zumanity, the decision raised painted eyebrows all over town. “People didn’t think I was going to be able to make it,” Arias recalls with pride. “They knew about my past, in bathrooms all over the world. But I blew their minds.” Performing ten shows a week for five years at the New York–New York Hotel & Casino, however, eventually lost its appeal. “I started losing my grip on what I was doing,” he says. “And my art clock started ticking.”  Hence the return to New York, and hence, too, the ambitious Arias with a Twist: a collaboration with the brilliant puppeteer Basil Twist, in which Arias will sing roughly a dozen numbers in a wild variety of settings, from an alien spaceship to the depths of hell. The show is the latest chapter in a book notable for crazy shifts of character. “Everything has been a mistake in my life,” Arias notes. “I never plan things. But sometimes a left turn becomes the right turn.” 

There have been many such turns. As a teenager in Los Angeles, Arias was briefly signed by Capitol Records as part of a teen-pop band called the Purlies. After moving to New York in 1976, he fell in with the New Wave pioneer Klaus Nomi, with whom he backed up David Bowie on Saturday Night Live. In the 1980s he performed with the troupe Mermaids on Heroin at Dancetera; in the 1990s, along with fellow drag stars Raven O and Sherry Vine, he sang for packed crowds at the West Village dive Bar d’O. Along the way, his persona has continually evolved, from petrified alien to devil and beyond; recently, he has tended toward Betty Page fetish gear and a geometric hairstyle, with Aztec bangs that square off the top of his face. (He describes himself as “a polymorph, a shapeshifter.”) 

Musically, a major shift came in the 1980s. In England, while recording an album with Iggy and the Stooges, he began doing what he calls “channeling Billie Holiday” while doing a mike check. The recording crew was stunned, and soon he began modeling his singing after Holiday’s. “Something about her voice just transcended,” he observes. “You go in, you go out, you dream of love and of something that you’ve lost.” He began performing in drag at the 1991 Wigstock Festival.  “I was at a standstill with the male thing,” he says. “But the moment I put that dress on my life changed.” 

In Arias with a Twist, he plans to explore his own variety, via songs that range from the Holiday standard “You’ve Changed” through tunes by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as well as originals by the Propellerheads’ Alex Gifford and several that Arias has cowritten. The musical numbers are built into a wild scenic adventure that Twist is designing. “When Basil and I talked about this show, I had some ideas,” Arias says. “I knew I wanted to be abducted by aliens. I knew I wanted to be on acid. And I knew I wanted a Busby Berkley something, with a cake and million legs and chorus girls.” The puppet master has been an admirer of Arias’s for years. “Joey is like a sorcerer,” Twist says. “He conjures or connects with this completely other world and makes everything else melt away.”

Arias, for his part, is ready to cast spell over New York again. “When I was in Vegas, I kept hearing that Manhattan was dead,” he says. “But the magic is still here and will always be here. If you feel the magic is gone, you need to go—because your magic is gone. New York is always changing. You’ve got to go with the change.”