Character Assassination

Marney McQueen is the ultimate triple threat: an all-singing, all-dancing master of impersonation. Ahead of her hosting gig at Aurora’s famous Fat Tuesday dinner, she speaks to Garrett Bithell. 

When Marney McQueen was a financially strapped NIDA student, her Kensington beautician offered to give her a free bikini wax if some trainees could watch the ordeal.

“At that point I’d only been adventurous enough to just get a ‘trim around the edges’,” she tells SX. “But I walked in and there were five trainees there, and my beautician said, ‘okay, undies off!’ She intended to give me a full Brazilian! I was quite young and I just had to say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was booked in for this. I don’t think I can go through with it!’

“In retrospect I should have, but at the time I felt like a lamb to the slaughter! And all the trainees were so embarrassed and apologetic – they knew I’d been lured there under false pretences.”

The beautician in question – who shall rename nameless – is the inspiration for one of McQueen’s most famous characters, Rosa Waxofski, bikini waxer to the stars. As she depilates your nether regions, colours your short and curlies, or administers her notorious ‘back, crack, sack and shaft’ wax, she offers beauty tips, unwavering advice for the unlucky in love, and fail-safe solutions for ailing careers.

“She was always trying to encourage me to get a ‘shape’ downstairs too,” McQueen says. “She said, ‘you should get the first initial of your boyfriend’s name! Trust me honey, the guys go crazy for this sort of thing’. I eventually did, and course the novelty wore off after four weeks.”

An essential aspect of Rosa’s characterisation is her visual vocabulary – leopard-print lycra onesies, an insane mullet hair-do reminiscent of Tina Turner circa ‘Simply The Best’, and copious lashings of blue eye-shadow, matched perfectly with a vast selection of turquoise jewellery. “She always wore leopard print,” McQueen says, “and she always wore high heels in the salon.”

Whilst most know McQueen from her high-profile roles in big musicals, including Marion in Priscilla and most recently the smiling assassin Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray, the backbone of her artistry is in impersonation and the development of a vast array of characters. Aside from Rosa, McQueen’s current juggernaut includes Karen, a border security officer who’s recently been appointed as Julia Gillard’s bodyguard since the Canberra incident; Damo, a young bloke from Cronulla just back from paying his respects at Gallipoli; Raelene, whose daughter is currently incarcerated in Denpasar; and Annabel Sarah Victoria Winters-Smithe, a loved-up carbon-neutral bride from Mosman.

“I love Annabel,” McQueen laughs. “It’s purging for me because I have been to that many weddings where they’ve sat me at the singles table, and people make speeches where they seem kind of smug about the fact they’ve found their soul mate.

“Annabel has married a very wealthy man and she’s got the blood diamond to prove it.”

McQueen’s approach to character development was highly influenced by a period spent in New York in 2005, where she struck up a friendship with none other than seminal Australian comic Barry Humphries. “I was hanging out with him when he was doing eight shows a week on Broadway in his 70s,” she recalls. “I really love his book, A Nice Night’s Entertainment, and inside the front cover it says: ‘the role of the artist is to create characters hitherto unseen but that are familiar to everybody’.

“That’s what I try to aspire to – not going for the stereotypical character that we’ve all seen before, but trying to find people that are real in our lives and that we all know, but have never seen on stage before.”

McQueen will be unleashing a saucy phalanx of her characters when she hosts the Aurora Group’s annual Fat Tuesday dinner, celebrating the traditional date of Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras), Carnival, Shrove Tuesday and Pancake Day. To be held Tuesday, February 21, the event is a fundraiser for Aurora’s charitable grants program for LGBT projects in Sydney and across NSW. Joining McQueen will be an array of local singers and comedians.

Next month, McQueen will return to Slide with her highly-acclaimed cabaret Sunburnt Country, where Rosa is accompanied by a member of the Longschlongadongski family; followed by a run at the Melbourne Comedy Festival with her new show, Rump Steak At A Vegan Barbeque, which is centred on her experiences “as a single girl in the big gay musicals Hairspray and Priscilla”. The show will come to Sydney later in the year.

“It will be the first show I’ve done where I perform as myself,” McQueen says. “I’m finding that concept terrifying because I won’t have the characters to hide behind.”Aurora’s Fat Tuesday dinner, Tuesday, February 21 at Carriageworks.

Pictured: Marney McQueen’s alter-egos Rosa Waxofski and, inset, Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray

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