Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
BenDeLaCreme is ready to be committed—to Ready to Be Committed! The RuPaul’s Drag Race all star/fan favorite/Miss Congeniality is taking her show on the road this spring, bringing a whimsical whirlwind of wedding-centric comedy to town after town, from San Francisco to New York City.
The one-woman cabaret casts DeLa in a number of attention-grabbing roles, from Grindr hookups to opinionated wedding cake toppers and a dozen other iterations of matrimonial cartoonery in-between. The show is a must see if you’re a fan of BenDeLaCreme’s stints on Drag Race and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, as it features a truly unfiltered version of this terminally delightful queen.
In order to get everyone in the mood for Ready to Be Committed, Decider hopped on the phone with DeLa for a crash course in everything that inspires her. Below you’ll find BenDeLaCreme’s hand-picked guide to bingeing the best of romance, comedy, and romantic comedies, all while you prep to see Ready to Be Committed when it rolls into a town near you.
'Pee-wee's Playhouse'
BenDeLaCreme: “Pee-wee Herman, Paul Reubens, has been such a huge influence on all of my work. I’ve been using Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the structure of his film as a jumping-off point for 11 years of art-making. In [Ready to Be Committed], you can see the correlation. I think he’s such a genius, his character-work is so amazing. It’s such an over-the-top crazy character that has his own internal logic, and his playhouse has its own rules and physics. But he makes you believe it because he’s so dedicated. And so it’s like, this totally insane character, you 100% can get on-board and be like, ‘Oh yeah, this world makes sense to me.’ … The structure of that show is so smart. It all takes place in this one world, but it’s really a variety show. It’s all just vignettes. I love giving my audience a lot of variety in what they’re looking at and what they’re experiencing. So that kind of variety show format, but put together into one narrative story. To me, that’s a really fun, exciting way to do it.”
'At Home with Amy Sedaris'
BenDeLaCreme: “Amy Sedaris has been a huge inspiration to me since Strangers with Candy, which is when I was first introduced to her. She pulls all these crazy faces, she’s so rubber-faced and her characters are so over-the-top. In less capable hands, you would never believe in this insane character. But she’s such a brilliant performer that you’re 100% like, ‘Yes, this old drug addict is absolutely living in the high school.’ And everything she makes, like serving hot fruit at a party, yes. That is logical.
“At Home with Amy Sedaris is the contemporary answer to Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It’s found this brilliant way to create a variety show that you don’t really notice is a variety show… Something I find so inspiring about Amy Sedaris is her love of costuming, because she plays all these other characters and she’s so brilliant at it. You know, like Patty Hogg on At Home with Amy Sedaris is such a fleshed-out character. But if you read any interviews with her, or you read her brother David’s stories about her, it’s like so much of it stems from her love of wigs and body-shaping modification and stuff like that. I play a lot of different characters in my shows. I play, I think 12 different characters in [Ready to Be Committed]. So much of that, for me, is connected to finding the perfect wig, finding the perfect trapping, and that’s part of how I love to find those characters. I think I feel solidarity with her in that.”
'Kroll Show'
BenDeLaCreme: “I think in terms of broadly what I do and who I admire, Kroll Show—I think Nick Kroll is brilliant in terms of his characterizations. He plays such a wide range of characters that, again, they’re so ridiculous but you fully believe in them. And his transformation from character to character, like his performative transformation is awesome.”
'Lady Dynamite'
BenDeLaCreme: “Maria Bamford is somebody that I really love. Her stand-up is something that has influenced me for a long time. Her shift from character to character, how fleshed out those characters are… I thought [Lady Dynamite] was great. I think my favorite moment in Lady Dynamite is when she had the opportunity to shift from character to character… I remember the first time I saw her do stand-up, I came away from it being like, ‘Oh, that’s so smart! She does this thing where she puts on a character voice as if it’s her real voice, and she flips into her real voice as a character voice.” I was like, that’s such a brilliant subversion. But then, the more you watch it, you realize that’s not her at all. And what she really is, is a brilliant mimic of how boring most people are… I’d love to see her have more large platform stuff like that, where she has even more of an opportunity. I feel like the audience only got a taste of the breadth of her performative abilities.”
'Cinderella'
BenDeLaCreme: “There are those moments that we all hook into as kids that feed what our idea of romance is. I think that starts with fairy tales. It starts with Cinderella for mostly everyone, and then the four billion movies that are just reinterpretations of Cinderella, like Pretty Woman, like My Fair Lady. It’s all the exact same plot over and over again, except she’s a hooker in one of them and she’s British in the other.
“One of the hugest moments that I would say aesthetically influenced [Ready to Be Committed], one of the first things I knew was that I needed that wedding dress from the ‘November Rain’ video.
“That wedding dress, that moment with the skirt so short in the front that it’s almost showing her crotch, and then it’s long in the back—that was everything I wanted as a kid. I saw that video, I thought that was the height of glamour. Showgirl legs, with the whole wedding fantasy floof in the back. The moment I started thinking about the show, I was like, that’s the silhouette I need. That’s my ultimate wedding dress.”
Rom-coms
BenDeLaCreme: “I love a rom-com. There’s a reason we love them. I don’t necessarily think they’re good for us, psychologically. [Laughs] In fact, I think they’re kind of damaging. But in some ways, it’s like the damage is already done. We’ve gotten all these lessons so early in life and these things are guilty pleasures, and some of them are amazingly brilliant films. I do think that we all need to have more messaging that it’s okay to not be in relationships or for your relationships to not look perfect all the time. And I think the idea that romantic comedies kind of hammer in—which is when you find the right person it means you’ll never have to work at your relationship—I think all those things are not true. But, at the same time, these films are fantasies, and sometimes it just feels good to indulge in a fantasy.
“I love so many of the classic rom-coms I grew up with. I love Sleepless in Seattle. I love When Harry Met Sally. Those types of movies absolutely make my heart swell. And I love—oh god, I’m trying to think of more contemporary rom-coms—Bridesmaids, for instance, in terms of thinking about [Ready to Be Committed]. That exploration of wedding culture, and the way we associate weddings with true love in a way that’s not really an accurate reflection when you dig into it a little bit more. I think that’s a brilliant film.”
'The Bachelor'
BenDeLaCreme: “Generally speaking, I find romance-based reality shows to be sort of hard to stomach. I have been through the reality TV wringer, so every time I watch somebody in interview say, ‘God, she is such a bitch!’ all I hear is the interviewer saying, ‘So, do you think she’s such a bitch? Can you tack ‘god’ onto the beginning of that? Can you condense that into a better soundbite?’ That’s all I hear.
“But that said, Drag Race [producers] do give you a very vague idea of what certain media moments you might want to get familiarized with before you go into film [a season of Drag Race]. So one of the things was—and we didn’t know why, we had no idea we’d be doing the improv challenge The Bitchelor on All Stars 3—but they did say, in the list of things you might want to check out, The Bachelor was one of them. And I could not believe how sucked in I got! That show is so horrible and so addictive. I simultaneously was like, oh my god, I hate what’s happening here and I absolutely cannot look away! That show is bonkers. I’d never really watched a lot of the wedding reality shows until I started deciding that this was the topic. But then I went in. I watched a lot of Bridezillas, I watched a lot of Say Yes to the Dress, and that stuff I also think is fascinating.”
'The Queen'
BenDeLaCreme: “[The Queen] is a really important time capsule. I think that it very accurately reflects a really important piece of drag history. That’s true of Paris is Burning, that’s true of a lot of these documentaries that hugely influenced Drag Race culture but a lot of Drag Race fans don’t know. There are so many quotes that people think Ru invented, but Ru is paying homage to a lot of these films. I’m so glad that that film is now easily accessible, because I think if you are a fan of contemporary drag, if you love Drag Race, this is your homework—and it’s fun homework… The way that film is made, they’re not producing a lot of what happens. If you see something that’s more modern, that has a bigger budget or is more mainstream, then you’re not going to know how much of it is truth and how much of it is being produced. But this is gritty and truthful. We’re seeing the reality of the situation and I think it’s awesome.”
