With her TikTok series a smash during lockdown, and after a chat with President Biden no less, Dylan Mulvaney was flying high as one of America’s most prominent transgender women – until a brand partnership with Bud Light sparked a boycott and a backlash. A year on, the 27-year-old arrives in Edinburgh with a musical comedy telling the story of her life, from dysphoric infancy via “twink” youth to notoriety as the gender nonconformist chewed up and spat out by America.
It’s not news that Mulvaney has musical-comedy chops: pre-transition, she starred in The Book of Mormon in the US. Faghag deploys those skills partly to make us laugh, but equally – as is the way of such shows – to secure whoops and cheers at our host’s “this is me!” self-celebration. A central section, focusing on her disorienting experience in the public gaze, is Faghag’s most compelling. It ends more like a rally than a comedy, but there’s plenty to enjoy before that, as the San Diego native evokes her experience simultaneously lionised and reviled, exploited and rejected by the corporate and celebrity worlds.
From a Barbie-pink set (notably high production values here for the fringe), she unspools a coming-out tale involving clashes with her church and traditionalist mum, working in a branch of Lush (a dramatic nadir, this scene) and first nervous fumblings with a straight boy. Voiceovers from Simon Callow (as God) and the performance artist Alok patch in additional characters, while Mulvaney doubles as newsreaders and chatshow hosts on a raised screen.
The show is jaundiced, as Mulvaney has every right to be, about mainstream America’s embrace of trans identity – as long as it stays palatable. With a slightly too schematic tearful song towards the end, it also confesses her unpreparedness for gender icon status. But the kink in her self-assertion is only momentary: soon “late-stage capitalism and misogyny” are back in the stocks, as Mulvaney leads a singalong hymning her nuanced gender identity. A bit too neat that, but after all she’s been through, and at the end of this slick and sparky show, who would deny her a moment of showbiz redemption?
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