The island’s most beloved comedian – drag queen, provocateur and cultural institution – is taking the stage at the Sands Theatre at Marina Bay Sands this month for a three-week run of Kumar Got Balls. Despite the timing, which coincides with the World Cup season, the show has absolutely nothing to do with football.
The show came together the way Kumar says his best ideas usually do – over food and drinks, with a group of collaborators he considers family, gathered at a producer’s house for a brainstorming session.
The result is an extravaganza in the fullest sense: drag queens alongside Kumar, dressed in ornate costumes, performing full musical numbers.
The ensemble matters deeply to him, he said – as some of the drag queens in the show have been with him for years, and the energy builds from that history. “The energy level is very high because they are all happy, and it’s not about dollars and cents,” he said.
What he hoped for when building Kumar Got Balls was a production without hierarchy. “There’s no star here, we are all stars in our own right. You want to outshine me? Go ahead. Because I don’t need to anymore,” he said with a smile.
One might say Kumar is Singapore’s answer to James Bond – except where 007 has the license to kill, Kumar has a license to make jokes.
“They are paying for what they want to hear. When I’m in a dress, I’m extra confident, no one can come near me,” he said.
What they came for is the same thing audiences have been coming for since 1992: Kumar in a dress, working a room, leaving a trail of crowd-work casualties behind him.
The 57-year-old made his name at the Boom Boom Room on Bugis Street, where his cross-dressing, which began as a comic device, hardened into a trademark – caustic wit and biting observations about politics, race and sex in Singapore. More than three decades later, he is still selling out venues, and now the largest one in the country.
Back then, the provocations came with a cost. Police monitored his shows since a rulebook for stand-up comedy had not been established, but Kumar eventually learned to self-censor well enough to stop the scrutiny. “I wasn’t rebellious, I was trying to justify that what I was doing was work,” he said.
The biggest mistake of his career, he reflected, was never giving his drag persona a separate name. He is Kumar on stage and off it, which meant it took audiences years to accept that the man in the dress and the man buying groceries were not, in fact, the same person.
Off stage, Kumar is somewhat of a paradox – quiet and by his own admission a recluse, the antithesis of the sequinned force of nature he is on stage.
“It took people a long time to accept who I am out of the dress,” he said. He is clear on the distinction that drag is performance, not his identity, and has little patience for the blurring he sees around him now. He misses when there were rules, even unspoken ones, when doing drag meant something because it cost something.
“Last time it was a secret, private,” he said of Singapore’s underground drag scene. “Now it’s open everywhere. It’s not as exciting anymore,” he said, admitting that he remains fairly traditional in his worldview.
Even amid the demands of putting Kumar Got Balls together, he said he reads the news obsessively every morning because the stage requires it. Current affairs are material, he said, and the show feeds off all of it: the observations that never quite make it into polite conversation but do make it onto Sands Theatre’s stage.
The 120 minute show runs through July 12 at the Sands Theatre. Tickets are available at sistic.com.sg.
