Among the creators of the bawdy, wildly funny Papaya Lounge cabaret, now in its sixth season of local sell-out shows, one was so shy as a youngster that her family had to face away from her as she crooned “Don’t Cry Out Loud.” Another began as a competitive gymnast and dramatic Bible verse reader. The third started singing at funerals alongside her pianist mother when the regular vocalist was out of town.
Sarah McKinney, Alyssa Hughlett and Janessa Johnsrude respectively star in the cabaret as Velvet Q. Jones, the buxom and busy host with very big hair and even bigger singing voice; Nancy Schwartz, Velvet’s frumpy, non-sexual life partner; and Musty Beaver, Velvet’s personal bartender, psychologist, chaos-coordinator and witchy best friend. The comedians reopen the seedy fictional club with Papaya Lounge: Supernatural(s) on Friday, Jan. 31, Feb 1, 6, 7 and 8 at Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theatre, at the school they all attended. Special guests include Komboujia, Will English, Jesse March, Alessandra Russo and Victoria Timoteo, as well as house band The Enthusiastic Consents, featuring Doug Marcum, Michael Schwartz, Marla Joy, Ken Lawrence and Tim Randles.
The promo materials and stars are vague about the supernatural aspect of the show. “We don’t reveal in advance what we wear or what we’re doing,” says McKinney with a laugh.
“It’s going to be looking beyond the veil, getting a little spooky and kind of a ghostly situation, and it always revolves around Nancy,” says Johnsrude. “The poster for the show was inspired by a 1970s horror film, so that’s another clue.”
Hughlett adds, cryptically, “I’m looking forward to some physically spectacular things happening.”
The first installment opened in 2018 before a packed Arcata Playhouse, with a very loose plot involving Velvet Q. Jones’ frantic efforts to fend off her creditors while being a catalyst in the transformation of her dowdy, clumsy assistant Nancy from frumpy klutz to athletic gymnast to a woman with sex appeal. Accompanied by other local performers, McKinney and Hughlett drew laughs with wit, banter, badinage, raillery, ripostes, quips, jests, persiflage and repartee with the band, and invited lively audience participation that has since become tradition.
McKinney says the audience’s favorable reaction spurred what was initially planned as a one-off on to a second performance the same year, with Johnsrude joining the cast. Johnsrude says the variety-based show she started with has evolved into a narrative about the three characters. “As we continued devising the shows in the following years up until now, more and more of the story, and the mystery of these three ding dongs has galvanized and it has really become a home, a container for expression of what feels vital right now.” She says, “It’s kind of an ‘event of theater’ rather than just going to a show. Shared experiences are really medicinal and I think gathering together through something that is crafted to be kind of like a party, but also opens up a fun world you become part of through the dimension of theater, is really special.”
All three of them are the writers, leaders and producers of the show, says McKinney, “and that is a source of pride for us as female theater creators, and especially as female comedians.” And all three of them have been shaped, in part, by Dell’Arte International School of Theatre.
As “a little kid with a big voice,” McKinney started singing when she was around 4 years old, practicing hymns with a neighbor. “I then graduated to belting Melissa Manchester’s ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ from the top of the stairs, with my family audience facing away from me because I was too shy to sing with them looking at me,” she says. A vinyl copy of Barbra Streisand’s The Broadway Album and voice lessons hooked her on performance in school and beyond. She earned an M.A. in theater production at then Humboldt State University followed by an M.F.A. in ensemble-based physical theater from Dell’Arte International.
Hughlett, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, says the gymnastics classes she enrolled in after being labeled “hyperactive” as a young child were her training grounds in a highly structured, regimented and disciplined high-risk sport from ages 7 to 16. She suffered fractures but reveled in the laughs she got launching herself into crash pads for a “full Wile E. Coyote splat.” In high school, she thrived in theater and speech competitions, mentored by her theater teacher Mr. Smith, winning medals and accolades for one-act plays, dramatic reading and interpretation of prose, poetry and Bible verses. She went on to the acting program at Texas State University, honing her physical performance skills with contact improvisation and modern dance training before immersing herself in Shakespearean theater at Shakespeare & Co., where, she says, “I uncovered my clown and inner comic.” Arriving in Blue Lake to attend Dell’Arte, “I thought I had made the worst decision of my life, but after the second week of training, I knew that I was where I was meant to be.”
Johnsrude says she, like her character Musty, feels “like I crawled out from under a log and came out as myself” after arriving at Dell’Arte — the log being her hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The child of a funeral pianist mother and political cartoonist father, she says she was “a nerd … a shapeshifter” with a “blazingly vivid imagination.”
Filling in for her mother’s regular vocalist at funerals as a teenager, she says, “The glint of my braces in the tears of the ‘audience’ as I crooned funeral hymns in an awkward-fitting black blazer was my introduction into the complicated world of performance anxiety.” A sense of humor, she says, was essential, “especially if you are next to an open casket,” and she developed a vital sense of “walking the line of irreverence in the serious soup of everything.”
School plays offered an escape in the world of a play and character, and she started collecting costumes and performing skits. An illicit but exciting side hustle in high school involved dressing in her mother’s clothes as Mama Joyce, “with a squirt of Oscar De La Renta perfume, becoming an unassuming and slightly dorky prairie mom character” to score Mike’s Hard Lemonade for other teens.
University drama classes weren’t a fit and Johnsrude spent a semester in the Czech Republic, then a summer with a company in Alberta before traveling to Bali on a grant to study mask carving. There, she met the late Dell’Arte founder Joan Schirle, who invited her to the school and became a mentor. “I was finally around people like me,” Johnsrude says. “My parents thought it was a cult and it definitely had that vibe.” After finishing her M.F.A., she stayed on to work at DAI. “I’ve had the pleasure of bringing my passion for transformation/expression into Pelican Bay State Prison as a teaching artist for almost a decade, and now I’m working for College of the Redwoods up there, too.”
Of course, Velvet, Nancy and Musty have origin stories of their own. “I started dreaming up Velvet near the end of 2016, while I was back home taking care of my mother as she was in the final months of her life,” says McKinney. She’d been looking at a wigmaker’s pieces on Instagram, obsessed with one but hesitating to buy.
“Then Trump got elected,” she says. “That night was so hard both because of the election and because of how sick my mom was. The next day was my birthday and life seemed so dark, so I decided to buy the wig and focus on building a character to give myself something fun to dream up. From there, I began piecing together Velvet. She’s a combination of a couple of characters I developed at Dell’Arte. But my Catholic upbringing, my mother’s obsession with my hair, my dad’s unfiltered sense of humor and Bette Midler’s bathhouse days were direct influences.” She describes Velvet as “a fun, inappropriate, larger than life, loveable pervert who sings. From the get-go, Velvet was a bottomless pit of desire, need and ego,” not built for a PG-13 rating.
“Velvet is that kind of character — one who wants everything all the time — who just naturally moves in the direction of being inappropriate and dirty,” McKinney says.
The Nancy character grew out of one of Hughlett’s Dell’Arte student-project assignments. Hughlett says she had pulled a lilac-purple church dress, white stockings, purple block-heeled dress shoes and a pair of wire-rimmed, Coke-bottle glasses from the costume box, adding “a feminine Kermit the Frog voice.” Her project collaborators helped with some backstory, and Nancy, the accountant for the First Baptist Church, was born. Her instructor’s feedback deemed Nancy more persona than character, and so Hughlett scrapped her. “But I secretly squirreled away the dress, her glasses and shoes, not knowing if I would ever parade or wear her again.”
Johnsrude points to the foundations of Commedia Dell’Arte as part of Musty’s creation. “The characters we play in Papaya Lounge are exaggerated, comical versions of ourselves and the appetites of our characters are pretty apparent in each of us. The ‘masks’ of our characters are fun ways to transmit these appetites contained within the ridiculous scenarios we craft.” For her, that craft often begins with wigs, costume pieces or teeth. And Musty began with a big, blonde wig first deployed when Johnsrude joined McKinney and Maggie Lally in The Beaverettes, “a little trio emulating the Boswell/Andrew Sisters mixed with a little John Waters.” Musty emerged as the younger, ditsier sister with mystical leanings.
“Papaya Lounge and Beaverettes all came together at the same time,” says McKinney, who was working at the Arcata Playhouse in 2017 and grabbed the chance to create and produce her own show. “The first thing I did was call Alyssa because I thought it would be so funny to have Nancy, the Baptist Church accountant, as Velvet’s dutiful assistant.” She says they asked Johnsrude to join but her schedule with the DAI program in Bali conflicted.
Hughlett, who’d just had her first child, was working at Dell’Arte, touring with UpLift Physical Theater and working as a teaching artist through the Playhouse. “Sarah approached me and told me that the Playhouse had asked her to lead a cabaret and that she had been cooking up this character, Velvet Q. Jones, who would have like this huge wig, and she explained that this character had a sidekick, and that the sidekick was Nancy. She was very resolute and after spending three intense years in a DAI ensemble with her, I could tell she had been struck with a vision of some kind.” Hughlett was in and eager also to work with Tim Randles and a live band.
Together, they carved out the premise of the Papaya Lounge as “this underground seedy place hosted by Velvet Q Jones,” says Hughlett, “and her sidekick Nancy was doing her best to save the business and keep Velvet happy as her personal assistant and non-sexual life partner.” More details and story developed around the cabaret-style platform showcasing local talent with McKinney’s writing, and the rapport between both the characters and the audience. Nancy and Velvet’s rapport and relationship, in particular, blossomed with the help of a live audience.
“When Alyssa and Sarah asked me to plug [Musty] into the Papaya world,” says Johnsrude, “we played up the ‘witch’ element more and she kind of got this bad-ass edge.” They have since ramped up her deviousness to “kind of be a champion for a messed-up sense of justice. It’s super fun to have a character that lives beyond a certain show,” she says, adding the bar setting creates opportunities for prop-based bits. “The ‘solutions’-based approach Musty often has opens up the door to new material and it’s fun in every creation process to see where that will go.”
While social and political content has made its way into the show, says McKinney that wasn’t necessarily the intent.
“We don’t focus on social or political commentary,” she says. “We focus on being funny. The three of us always follow the desires of the individual characters. We just write about what’s in our hearts and souls and follow what makes us laugh. Perhaps the three of us have a way of sniffing out the humor in the intense and provocative worldly issues surrounding us.”
Regarding the adult humor, Johnsrude says, “We leaned into not-so-safe from the get-go as soon as we joined forces — way more fun! To my thinking, since we weren’t creating a ‘family-friendly’ situation and didn’t need to sell tickets to a specific audience on a tour, we had the cabaret-style platform, which is subversive and risqué in nature already.”
“If we venture into unsafe, offensive or dangerous comedy, it is because we follow the path of the idiotic to get there,” says Hughlett. “While that is true, I think there is also a part of each of us that cares about inclusivity, body positivity and tapping into what makes us funny as women.”
The show is, McKinney admits, “not for everyone, certainly not for kids. About half of our audience are ‘Papaya-heads’ and the rest, including lots of bachelorette parties, come to our show to have a good time. What I know about them is that they are ready to laugh, have fun, engage with us and even play on stage with us. They come for a party and we play off that energy for sure.”
Johnsrude, who was previously in a rap duo called Vagsicle, is used to pushing boundaries and, like her partners in Papaya, has the support of her family in her comedy and theater performances. “My poor parents are probably constantly facepalming up in Saskatchewan and perhaps desperately lying to their friends about what I do, but they have always been supportive of me,” she says. “I’m talking years of texting them photos, after they asked how my weekend was, of me dressed as a worm in a bald cap or telling them I’m in some random theater or festival laying eggs as a giant clam or something.” And like her partners, she says not having her family at the show might be best for everyone. “Did I mention my mom tried to raise me Catholic? Didn’t work. But it provided a lot of material for our last show.”
“No one in my family has seen the Papaya Lounge,” says McKinney. “My dad and my sister are very supportive of me, but they live far away so coming to shows is hard. Also, maybe there’s a part of them that feels relieved about that, so they don’t have to feel pressured to watch me sing surrounded by genital puppets.”
“My parents have never seen Papaya Lounge, nor do I think they really know about it either,” says Hughlett. “My mom might be the only one who has seen some of our promo on ‘the socials.’ They still think that I do plays like ‘Death of Salesman’ or Shakespeare when I do theater. Over the years, I have pervertedly thought I should invite them to come see the play I am in called The Papaya Lounge but then my better angels tell me that might not be the best idea. It probably would not be as bad as I think it is in my head if they come, but it’s mostly the possibility of a discordant discourse that would follow ….”
McKinney says working with Hughlett and Johnsrude has been one of the best experiences of her life. “I have so much fun playing with them. It brings me so much joy and I feel grateful and honored to be able to create with these two amazing, funny and talented women. The band is also such a grounding force. They hold it down and play with us. They are such an important part of this show.”
And McKinney says she loves the Papaya Lounge audience.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” she says. “Our audience is with us all the way. It makes me emotional to think about how lucky we are to be able to share this bit of ridiculousness with our community and for them to show up for us time and time again. Papaya Lounge is our way of expressing our deep love for our community.”
Papaya Lounge: Supernatural(s) opens Jan. 31 at Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theatre, with performances Feb 1, 6, 7 and 8 (sold out) at 8 p.m. (ages 18 and up, $40, $200 table for four in the Splash Zone). The Feb. 6 performance will be followed by a Performing Arts Party Schmear Schmooze at the Logger Bar. The Feb. 8 performance will be followed by an after dance-party, also at the Logger Bar. Visit papayalounge.com for tickets.
Mark Larson (he/him) is a retired Cal Poly Humboldt journalism professor and active freelance photographer who likes to walk.
This article appears in Enter the Papaya Lounge.