If power-dressing is all about dressing up for the parts we want in life – and at work – then Drag queens have always raised it to the next level. “I don't usually feel desirable, but in Drag, I feel like I'm the supermodel of the world,” says lawyer and Drag performer Aishwarya Ayushmaan (Lush Monsoon) over a Zoom call. “That is the power that drag gives you,” she adds. Lush is co-starring in a Drag musical titled ‘Superqueens’ with Betta Naan Stop (Prateek Sachdeva), Sickk, Hash Brownie, Whacker Cracker (Paridhi Chauhan) and Jaidhar Vashist, which opened at The Piano Man, Malviya Nagar, on Thursday (July 10, 2025).
At the centre of the 90-minute musical directed by Vivek Mansukhani are two questions: What does Drag mean to you? And what does it take to be a Drag performer in India’s Capital? The show – with its mix of Bollywood, indie and pop music (no original numbers here) – follows five Drag performers over a week as they navigate life and work in a nightclub.
Though scripted, a lot of the musical feels improvised. (Expect a lot of “girl” and “behen” being thrown around, as we see the girls on stage and in dressing rooms talking about money problems, work opportunities and transitioning.) Part of this could be because these artistes have been performing together for several years, and they riff off each other in a way that feels more genuine than practised. Segments of the musical are also autobiographical – with the queens sharing their thoughts on why they Drag, their living situation, their Drag family and their biggest hurdles – and that may be a contributing factor also.
As the performance unfolds, theatre actor Jaidhar Vashist – the only non-Drag cast member in the musical – plays multiple roles. He’s the designer who promises a “collab” but wants to upsell his product to the queens, he’s the pesky businessman who won’t take no for an answer, he embodies trans-curiousness and transphobic attitudes by turns, and he precipitates moments of crisis and introspection.
As expected in a Drag performance, some of the costumes are glam. But mostly, they just get the job done. (Sickk, who was in-charge of the looks along with Hash Brownie, says doing the musical was different from their regular shows in that they couldn’t just create one glam look per queen, but had to think about multiple looks that also gelled with how each queen wanted to present herself on stage. As Sickk tells it, it was about finding and styling velour to give off velvet.)
The conversations between the girls, the jokes about tucking and stuffing are not new. But coming from them, they feel worthy of attention.
The best bits of the musical are undoubtedly the dance numbers, a couple of which are sizzling, and a couple, not so much – watch out for Whacker Cracker’s performance to “Uyi amma main toot ke bikhar gayi” from the film 'Azaad'.
The show is not always entertaining, and some dancers are better than others, but the whole effect is arresting. It helps that The Piano Man venue feels intimate. The wood interiors and (very) dim lighting feel transportive. (The Piano Man’s Arjun Sagar Gupta says that 40 Martin lights, a Sennheiser wireless system and a 220-inch LED wall have been pushed into service for this show - Gupta was also on lights for the opening show on Thursday.) The night this reviewer saw the performance, the audience cheered and clapped which also became part of the atmosphere of the show.
There's much to unpack here. In a video interview with Moneycontrol, director Vivek Mansukhani and the performers spoke about the musical, “self-expression through costuming”, and how this performance cuts through the stratification in Drag. Excerpts:
Vivek, if you could start by telling us about the show. How did it come together?
A few months ago, Lush Monsoon and Betta Naan Stop came to me with an idea. We’d connected at various festivals and so on (before). Lush said, you know, we have a group of Drag Queens and we perform at nightclubs all over the country. We do mostly dance numbers where we are lip syncing, and we are great performers. We love what we do, but we also feel we need to tell our story to a broader audience. We would also like to act. That interested me. I mentioned to them that why don't you come up with a script idea and a draft script. They did. And I was quite overwhelmed and blown away by the kind of concept they had in mind and also their real-life stories: The five of them, what got them into drag, why they do this, what do they enjoy about it, what are the challenges that they have and how difficult it might be for a performer who is already “different” to be able to find resources and audiences in cities where there are closed minds.
I normally work with actors only, but these are actors, dancers, performers who do their own makeup, costume and they're really invested in every department of their performance, which is something very unique. So working with – I would say, not non-actors but – very basic actors, to bring them up to a level where they're on a world-class stage at Arjun’s centre to perform, has been tough. But I think we're getting there. And if you see the show, I hope you'll enjoy the acting as much as the dancing and all the glam and glitz about the show.
Lush and Betta, where did this idea come from?
Lush: Betta and I have been doing Drag for almost eight years now. I'm from a theatre background, I've been part of theatre crews before. And Betta has been a musical theatre enthusiast (she was Danceworx between 2016 and 2018). So we both wanted to do something on a musical level, on a scale like that. Last year, when there was a lull in terms of not having very exciting things to do in terms of Drag, is when we said let's do something, let's take Drag to the next level because you've done everything else that is there to be done. That's when we met Vivek. I had known him before (from the theatre circuit).
Betta: Like Lush said, it literally came from a need to do something bigger… There are Drag artists all over India and there are various good shows and acts happening as well. But a musical has never happened. Lush mentioned she's from a theatre background, I have a dance background. For the stage, we are all just coming together; two of us taking care of the costumes, we have somebody taking care of PR and marketing. It's all like a great engine and all these parts working together… we have an amazing team with these great set pieces where we have just elevated the story.
Whacker Cracker: You actually end up spending a lot of money on costume. I started Drag when I was 16 years old. Hash Brownie here made this monster. I’ve known all these performers for 7-8 years. When I was a kid, they were doing Drag. They were my inspiration. Now I'm working with them, better than them. We have been doing this same thing... same clubs, same type of performances. We wanted to upgrade but we were not hoping to upgrade this much. Now we can't go back, because this is the highest level and highest evolution you can see from us. We are the Pokémons of this new evolution.
Tell us about the costumes and makeup.
Betta: Sickk and Hash Brownie, who've been in charge of the costume department of the show, they'll take over this question.
Sickk: My standpoint has always been fairly visual and it's always been fashion-forward. I understood so much of my own gender identity through fashion. (For the) looks, both of us have a very distinct eye of how we want things to look like. And it was months and months of just figuring out how to create the overall look of the show. You have to understand that we're working with five ginormous Divas, all of us included. Each has a specific stamp that they want. Everybody has so many ways that they want to be showcased. To bring something that kept that but then also created something that was cohesive, that was a really fun challenge to undertake. It was a lot of hustle since, oh, I'm the queen of the hustle. We went to a lot of markets to source fabric, whatever we could possibly do because we're very visual about how we see ourselves on the stage. The thing about Drag is that it's all about taking velour and turning it into velvet, right? You really do take, like, the cheapest material or whatever and you have to present it like it's the most priciest couture fabric in the world. So much of what we do is exactly that. It's the scrappiness.
The costumes for this show, like, we were kind of in new territory. This is not just a regular show. It's for a musical now. So we can't just do, like, one amazing, fabulous look, and then like for the rest of the show, we don't look that good. We had to maintain that standard throughout, for all the costumes.
What is the most number of costumes any one queen is doing?
Six… The costumes are not your normal pedestrian clothes. You have to take care of certain things because we would wear these inner wears, paddings and all. You have to hide them, you have to blend them smoothly. You have to wear like six layers of stockings. So there's a lot of things for some of us, because we recreate a whole silhouette. We create our own faces, you know.
Lush, you mentioned recreating a whole silhouette with a look. This also speaks to your idea of Drag, of self-expression through costuming, correct?
Absolutely. Drag is about recreating something completely different. What we present to the world, harvesting something which is deep within us: this diva, this personality, whatever that gender might be; masc(uline) or femme or whatever it is. It's something which is larger than life and which we all have within us. It's just how we unleash it on stage. Drag becomes the medium for that.
We use our makeup to recreate a whole new personality; we create a whole new body (for ourselves)... like this hourglass shape, which you might not have out of Drag. And for a bigger queen like me, that is a big thing, because out of Drag, I don't usually feel desirable. But in drag, I feel like I'm the supermodel of the world. So that is the power that Drag gives you. That's what drag means to me.
Jai, tell us about your role in the musical and how you prepared for it? How do you fit into this group?
I've been doing theater for 3-4 years. I'm an undergraduate student who's just finished his third year. I'm studying literature and performing arts. And I've never been part of either a musical or a Drag show.
I play five different characters who interact with the Superqueens in very different ways. These characters are based on actual people who were a part of the larger umbrella category of ‘causing challenges and obstacles’ to the Superqueens. Problematic people, unaccepting people, people who are trying to fleece them, loot them, deceive them – non-well-wishers, basically. And through each of these scenes, each of these characters, there's a lot more explanation happening about Drag, about what it means to be a Drag performer, what are the kinds of challenges that people impose on Drag performance. And just embodying that side taught me a lot about Drag itself and the perception around it.
Vivek, tell us what to expect at the show…
It's a journey from a Thursday to a Thursday night. Thursdays are club nights, particularly LGBTQ nights. So it opens on one Thursday night and ends the other Thursday night. But in that process, the queens meet a lot of different people… characters keep coming every night to meet them in their green room. They (the queens) are hoping for some help, but they don't get any help. At the end of the day, they decide to take the reins in their own hand and launch themselves as Superqueens. That's what the story is about in a nutshell.
I mean, it's a very simple story, but we've structured it across 7-8 different scenes. There's a big show number and a scene post the big show number.
You mentioned that this is a Cabaret-style musical. What elements of Cabaret, and why? Also, would you say there’s been some stultification in terms of where Drag is performed, what avenues are open – a lot of you mention performing in nightclubs as a sort of staple.
Vivek: The Piano Man, which is a jazz club and a music club, lends itself to a night culture and shows. We start here at 9 pm and continue to midnight. And that's the kind of shows even the Drag artists here do in their various clubs. And that lends itself to a Cabaret style where people are performing in high glamour, high drinks, high-high heels, and the audience are sitting enjoying a drink, watching them. A very relaxed atmosphere. So that was what we meant by a Cabaret style. This show would work very differently in a Kamani or on a Habitat stage, but I think The Piano Man venue lends itself to a lot more atmosphere and a lot more of that perfect environment to take in – all the glamour and blitz. We have all kinds of dancing. We have Broadway dancing, we have Bollywood stuff, we have pretty much everything. So Cabaret (here) means like a khicchdi for us, basically in a nightclub.
Arjun Sagar Gupta: Cabaret is a style of performance which is related to expressiveness and delivery of emotion. If you look at the stalwarts of Cabaret… the amount of emotion they can bleed through one frame is unbelievable.... The world of the musical and of Cabaret, these two worlds … have been combined (in this show) with the methodology of the musical, which is music plus theatre plus dance.
Lush: The stratification that you mentioned is definitely there. Drag picked up in India around eight years ago; it started picking up slowly to where it is right now. We have broken the stratification a little bit; this production is also part of breaking away from that stratification for us because very often Drag is relegated to LGBTQ nights only. We only like get booked when it is like a queer night.
Betta: Or it's Pride Month.
Lush: But Drag is essentially just a performing art… even if it's just a 5-minute lip-sync tumble, the joy that it provides to people. And that's what we wanted to do here… But, yeah, the stratification is there and hopefully this show will break that, and we'll be able to take it to new venues, more places and introduce it to newer audiences, not just the regulars – we have a very dedicated crowd that comes to watch us, like, every week that we perform.
So much of the soul of the show is exactly that, with us being the novel creatures so far removed from the reality of heterosexual-first, right? Bridging that gap and also showcasing the humanity of the nightlife steam itself – that it's not just a place for people to go to escape, it's also a major ecosystem that is built by hardworking people. We are performers within an industry, and we deserve space.
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