This is a curated collection of video segments from across my stage career, demonstrating the versatile nature of performance and the ways in which it affects one's personal growth, with a particular highlighting of the ways in which gendered roles affected performance.
2010. The roles in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” were almost entirely male, and our opera company’s junior division was almost entirely female. As a result, there is this scene in which ten 8-9 year-old girls play grown men (myself included, as the Pied Piper).
2011. In this duet from “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,” Charlie Brown seeks comfort from Lucy Van Pelt’s makeshift psychiatric booth. However, both myself and my scene partner were girls, and so while I remained straight-dressed as Lucy, she cross-dressed to be Charlie.
2016. This scene is my entrance as Detective Sergeant Trotter in Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.” Also visible is a female co-star similarly cross-dressed to play Mr. Paravicini.
2016. For this scene of “The Mousetrap,” I carefully rehearsed how to sit as a man (in particular, a cocky and indignant 22-year-old man) as well as how to naturally move across the stage while tracing the telephone wire and propel myself out the prop window, silently and without resorting to swaying my hips.
2016. For this scene of “The Mousetrap,” it is my voice and aggression that are the most transformed.
2016. In “Stepsisters’ Lament” from Cinderella, the two ugly stepsisters bemoan how they are not as feminine or desirable as Cinderella. This makes for a far more bombastic number than anything the lead sings in the musical. Here, my scene partner and I donned bold 1980s dresses and over-rouged cheeks to emphasize un-femininity. It was a very liberating experience!
2016. I’ve included this excerpt to highlight what the ultra-feminized, classical soprano voice sounds like and looks like in similar scenarios. Here, I perform “June” in a floral dress, focusing on sounding beautiful rather than putting on a character.
2017. The Canadian Children’s Opera Company (Youth Chorus division, where all players are 16+) puts on a musical production of Commedia Dell’Arte, in which classic characters Pantalone and Arlecchino, among others, break into song. This scene follows Pantalone (an old man, played by a soprano girl) trying to seduce Colombina, Arlecchino trying to seduce a townswoman named Puto (played by a teen boy in drag), and lovers Lelio and Celia (myself) flirting in synchronicity. The Youth Chorus was an exceptionally gender-balanced group that year, and so many performers chose to play outside of their gender, rather than doing it out of necessity.
2019. I perform as a drag king for my friends, lip-syncing to “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel. I attribute my confidence in this performance to my myriad of experience with gender-play on stage over the years.
2023. Backstage at Heathers: the Musical, myself and fellow lead actor pranked the cast and crew by swapping costumes and learning each other’s vocal parts and blocking in our pivotal duet, “Seventeen.” Here, he plays Veronica and I play JD, much to the delight of our peers.
Gendered Performance 