Going big, not home: Woo is celebrating his fiftieth in suitably larger-than-life style
(Picture: Natasha Pszenicki, assisted by Monty Vann. Clothes by Julian J Smith)No-one puts on a show like Jonny Woo. Two-and-a-half weeks from now, on October 9, the London drag icon will celebrate his upcoming birthday — a big one, the half century — at Dalston’s EartH with a “queer extravaganza of Las Vegas proportions”. “It’s going to be at least three hours,” Woo laughs. “You’ll definitely get your money’s worth!”
Jonny Woo’s Golden Woobilee — the name was thought up long before the recent news — is promising a dazzling, anything-goes variety show bringing together more than a dozen acts who’ve honed their craft at The Glory in Haggerston, Woo’s LGBTQ+ pub and pillar of the London queer scene. Expect plenty of comedy, big-belted songs, sharp-tongued stand-up and drag every which way. “It’s definitely going to be one to remember…” says Woo with a wolfish grin. “I am beyond excited for it. It’s all my favourite performers in one place, or most of them, all together for one night only.”
A comedian and drag queen himself, Woo will bookend the show with a few numbers of his own, but while the night is about him (“Of course, I am at the centre of it all!”), it’s not really, he maintains. “Really, I’m just looking forward to watching a lot of favourite performers get up on stage and show how talented they are,” he says. “I’m throwing the kind of celebratory bash that I’d like to be at even if it wasn’t my birthday.”
Woo couldn’t imagine marking a milestone birthday any other way, he adds. “The thing I get the most pleasure from is facilitating a space for other people to perform.” By way of proof, he’s agreed to be roasted by the night’s hosts, drag stars Rhys’s Pieces and Sue Gives A F***. Both know Woo well. “Let them rip me to shreds!” he says with a knowing smile. “I know I’m going to cringe and think: ‘oh my God, I really did that!’”
And granted, if they want to talk about Woo’s career as a performer, writer and director, they’ll have plenty of material to draw from. Over the past two decades, Woo has been a pivotal figure in defining London’s queer performance scene with a succession of irreverent shows and talent nights everywhere from East End dive bars to venerable West End institutions, one night filling Stoke Newington Town Hall with two dozen Liza Minnelli impersonators and another singing show tunes at Soho Theatre with award-winning cabaret veteran Le Gateau Chocolat. “Jonny’s inherent queerness gave and gives me permission I didn’t know I was seeking,” says Gateau. “I’m enhanced by our friendship.”
In 2018, Woo even brought his playfully provocative All Star Brexit Cabaret to the Coliseum, home usually to the English National Opera. “That was definitely a career highlight,” he says. “I did have to take a moment afterwards like, did I just really do that?’” The show, which was put on with Jerry Springer the Opera man Richard Thomas, was a chic satire of the 2016 referendum. If it seemed a sharp left-hand turn, it followed a career full of them.
When he opened The Glory in 2014 with friends John Sizzle and Colin Rothbart, Woo cemented his status as the edgy but benevolent godfather of London’s alternative drag scene. London’s LGBTQ+-friendly venues had been in decline for a while — it’s been reported that more than 120 gay nights and venues have closed since 2000 — and accordingly the spaces for queer performers was shrinking. Woo, Sizzle and Rothbart helped change that.
Jonny’s an inspiration on how to achieve commercial success without sacrificing your artistic and queer integrity
“Jonny has always been incredibly supportive of new talent,” says RuPaul’s Drag Race star Crystal, who puts their big break down to the pub’s annual Lipsync 1000 contest. “He’s also an inspiration on how to achieve commercial success without sacrificing your artistic and queer integrity.”
Inspiration seems to be Woo’s stock-in-trade. DJ and drag queen Jonbers Blonde likewise credits Woo with giving her the confidence to carve out a queer career. “When I first moved to big scary London from Belfast, it was quite daunting going out alone in drag for the first time,” she says. But Jonny opened his arms to me and said ‘welcome!’ He’s always been magic to me.”
Woo’s support for others, and his inspiration to London’s LGBTQ+ party-starters, is, then, likely to be a touchstone of the celebrations on October 9. Glyn Fussell, co-founder of Sink The Pink, the era-defining club night that recently hung up its heels after 14 enormously successful years, calls Woo the “seed” that east London’s queer scene grew from.
“He is and will always be an icon who made us believe we could achieve anything we wanted as weird and wild, chaotic, fabulous queer creatures.”
One question, though, is how an aspiring dancer from Kent with “absolutely no interest in drag” became an era-defining stalwart of London’s queer scene.
Woo himself credits an “incredibly formative” stint living in New York at the turn of the millennium, having completed dance school in London and in need of a change of scenery. “I was a bit too scared to try and make it as a dancer in London, so I tried to do it somewhere else,” he recalls.
But it was NYC’s eye-popping nightlife, not its dance studios, that caught his eye. “It was just so brilliant and wild and rough and fun,” he smiles. “I was so excited by all the sexy naked performances I was seeing — drag queens, strippers and spoken word [artists] all in the same space. It was amazing!”
And so Jonathan Wooster bloomed into punky drag upstart Jonny Woo. “I just took an old nickname from my school days and never really thought of it as an alter ego,” he says. “But very recently someone said to me, ‘I’ve never seen you do Jonny Woo’, which made me realise that I kind of do have two separate identities.”
When he returned to London in 2003, Woo’s first gigs were at The George and Dragon, Shoreditch’s now-gone spit-and-sawdust gay pub. “I’d stick on an outfit, stand on a barrel in the corner and yell through the microphone as I played my dad’s record collection,” he recalls. His raucous energy struck a chord with punters and soon the gigs grew into Radio Egypt, an improvised performance night that filled the pub on Sundays. The following year, he began a long-running and influential residency at Bethnal Green restaurant Bistrotheque. “It started with me doing what I’d describe as renegade pub performances, but in time they became cabaret performances,” he recalls. “And then other people wanted to join in so we did loads of talent competitions and stuff like that.”
You go sober because you feel like s*** and you’re probably going to kill yourself,
Woo also teamed up with Sizzle and fellow drag disrupter Ma Butcher for Gay Bingo, an off-the-wall blend of performance and number-calling began in a Brixton dive bar and filled venues across town for a decade. “The scene kind of built around those nights,” Woo says. “I’m not going to say I’m totally responsible, but I do know that when I came back from New York, people were really waiting for something new.”
Woo ran with it but admits he was prone to burning the candle at both ends. In 2006, he spent five weeks in hospital after “a binge spiralled too far” and he suffered multiple organ failures. “I was in a drug-induced coma for about two-and-a-half weeks, but when I came out of it my liver and kidney kicked back in and I made a full recovery.”
Despite being told he’d technically died for “about five seconds”, Woo was so desperate to perform again that he didn’t properly confront what had happened, but it would ultimately lead to a major lifestyle change. In 2014, with his self-esteem at an all-time low, he decided to go sober. “You go sober because you feel like s*** and you’re probably going to kill yourself,” he says bluntly. “You go sober because the drink and drugs stop working for you.” Later that year, he opened The Glory, which he credits with re-vitalising his work ethic and the rest of his life, too.
It has been, then, a wild ride. Woo believes London’s queer performance scene is now “the strongest it’s ever been”; he just wishes there were more LGBTQ+ venues to support it. “We really struggle with urban development,” he says. “Let’s be honest: it’s gone beyond gentrification now — it’s literally just people slapping up flats wherever they can, which is very dangerous for nightlife.” Still, he points out proudly that the city “remains full of people with brilliant ideas who want to do things”. And as Jonny Woo’s Golden Woobilee will prove, the seed he planted nearly 20 years ago is continuing to sprout fresh shoots.
