Zachary Clause Does Bette Midler
The first time Zachary Clause was introduced to Bette Midler, he was about eight years old, and Beaches (1988) was on TV. “Something about her performance as C.C. Bloom really drew me in,” says the queer multidisciplinary artist, who years later revisited the movie with a new perspective and fell even more in love with Divine Miss M. “She was campy and vulnerable all in the same movie. Even when she’s being funny, you see her pain, her fear, her anger.”
In Beaches, based on an original novel by Iris Rainer Dart, Bette Midler is Cecilia Carol Bloom, a successful singer in a melodramatic story about a life-long female friendship. “There’s a line in the movie while C.C. is watching herself in an interview on TV. She cringes when she hears herself tell the interviewer, ‘C.C. Bloom is a deeply feeling person.’ That’s what Bette is! Everything she’s done, from the Bathhouse performance to The Rose, feels so intensely felt. I admire that intense vulnerability.”
Clause and Bette have a lot of things in common, starting with their passion for theatre, cabaret, and live performances. In fact, she inspired him to create one-woman shows in New York City. “I had a nervous breakdown after my last professional acting job. Despite working consistently and generating money for my agents, they decided to clean house and drop half of their clients, including moi. So, I went back to school, read a lot of Judith Butler, James Baldwin, listened to A LOT of Bette Midler, and decided I wanted to start writing my own cabarets,” says the talented actor, who created the alter ego Sherry Duvall-Covington and has written several shows for over the last years, including Is That All There Is: An Evening With Sherry Duvall-Covington, and Sherry Takes A Holiday.
The Continental Baths
With his latest show, Zachary Clause Does Bette Midler at The Continental Baths, the artist is celebrating not only his favorite diva but also a different era for the queer community. “The Continental Baths was a gathering place for gay culture like we, unfortunately, don’t have today. It was a moment in our history where you could fuck without fear of AIDS, see a cabaret, and get STI tested all under one roof. While there were also a lot of other obvious challenges with being queer in the early 70s that we’re fortunate not to have to face today, I think we also missed out on bathhouse culture. I don’t think we will ever arrive at a queer Utopia, but I do believe that was one moment in our history that came close.”
The Continental Bathhouse was opened in 1968 in the basement of The Ansonia Hotel in New York City and became extremely popular very quickly. The place featured a small disco dance floor, a swimming pool, an STD clinic, and a cabaret lounge where Bette Midler started her career and created her stage persona, Divine Miss M.
In his show, Clause reconnects with the past in an almost spiritual way. “The first line of the show is the opening to the song Friends, that always gives me chills. I stand on stage, scan the room, and sing, ‘And I am all alone. There is no one here beside me.’ During that moment, I’m Zach imagining the faces of those gay men in the audience on that night, many of whom would no longer be alive within a few years. To me, this show is an invocation of that mythical moment in queer history. As a queer person in 2021, it’s not lost on me how lucky I am. It’s important to me to never lose sight of our history.”
A new performance of Zachary Clause Does Bette Midler is scheduled for Monday, 13, at Goody Judy, in Brooklyn, starting 8PM. Tickets are on sale for $20.
Superstar
This week, Bette Midler received the 44th Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements with a tribute that included Scarlett Johansson, Beanie Feldstein, and a message from Adele, who said, “Bette Midler is the greatest performer who ever lived.” - a sentence that Clause could easily agree with.
To celebrate the Divine Miss M’s achievement, here’s Clause’s favorite performance from his personal diva. A cover of Superstar, originally by The Carpenters, at The Continental Baths. “The way she channels the pain of loneliness and obsession was unlike anything I heard – her voice breaks, she cracks, she’s messy. Then when I saw the Continental Baths recording a few years later, I was blown away by the imperfection and chaos of it all. To me, the perfection of that performance comes from all of the imperfections. It’s cabaret, but it kind of feels more rock and roll. As someone who went to theatre school and did the whole commercial theatre thing and was told that every line had to be perfectly memorized and every note had to be crystal clear, here was this Goddess. Her voice is cracking and is forgetting lyrics, and no one care because she is completely electric. The emotion is the most important thing.”
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