The Name on Everybody's Lips Is Jinkxie

The Drag Race champ says she's "always aspired to be washed up." In Chicago, she's definitely the star.

- Brock Colyar

FAME IS A fickle thing. If you desire attention-if you need it usually you have to sing and dance for it, and you'd better keep it fresh. That's the lesson sexy murderess and would-be vaudeville star Roxie Hart learns in the musical Chicago, and often it's the lesson of reality television, quite literally so on RuPaul's Drag Race: You'd better lip-sync for your life! As it happens, Jinkx Monsoon, the only queen to win Drag Race twice ("I claim this in the name of Hecate, Mother of Witches," she declared when crowned the Queen of All Queens, beating other past winners she was pitted against in Drag Race All Stars last year), is starring as prison warden Mama Morton in Chicago. She is appropriately bewitching in the role. I overheard one veteran usher at the Ambassador Theatre telling two excited fans during intermission, "I've never seen a standing ovation for Mama Morton in the middle of the show. Not in 26 years."