Dido & The Belindas a safe party for the abandoned

Singapore drag performer Becca D'Bus plays Carthage queen Dido, while Greek hero Aeneas is a chandelier

- Clement Yong

THEATRE DIDO & THE BELINDAS T:>Works 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road July 18 Part of the fun of this is in the late-night, underground ambience, the audience dragging their chairs round little cocktail tables, bottles of drinks already flowing.

In a theatre scene more familiar with the cushy theatres of the Esplanade or Wild Rice, here is immediately a sense of possibility.

Then Singapore drag queen Becca D'Bus strides onto the runway stage, plumped up with heaps of garment and wearing as her crown a tin foil-lined helmet of antenna, belting aria: "Ah! Belinda, I am press'd... Peace and I are strangers grown."

The lament from Henry Purcell's 1689 opera Dido And Aeneas is mournfully sung by American lyric tenor Thomas Michael Allen, equally heavily made-up and sat amid the audience in a high chair.

D'Bus mouths the words in sync, gesticulating mockingly, sometimes impatient.

The clash of aesthetics is at once brazen but also familiar to drag culture, where model poses in the photo shoots of vogue and the boldest fashion pieces have always been appropriated to glamorise and empower.

Here it is, attracting a theatre crowd, set to the twangs of the harpsichord played by Japanese musician Toru Yamanaka.