Local drag queens Spice up your life this weekend

Late on a Sunday aftrernoon, in the dressing room behind the stage at Missie B’s, five drag queens are scattered in various states of dress. Ryan Chambers (known as Genewa Stanwyck) stands in the doorway leading to the smoking patio, a cigarette in his right hand. His makeup is mostly done, the long false lashes heavy on his lids, but he has yet to complete the transformation with a wig and hip pads.

It’s been a few hours since he wrapped up the weekly drag brunch at Hamburger Mary’s, and this is a rare moment of repose for the full-time drag queen. Yesterday, he tells me with a voice that mixes weariness and cheer, he spent 11 hours in drag. Before he assumes another role for our photo shoot — that of Ginger Spice — he’s going to, as he puts it, let his body breathe.

The rest of the queens — Heidi Banks (Bryan LaFave), Moltyn Decadence (Ryan Webster), Mrs. Jones (Keel Williams) and Tajma Stetson (Michael Tolbert) — are busy completing their own Spice Girl looks. It’s five days until the Spice Girls Dragtacular hits the stage at Missie’s for the second year in a row, and this was not supposed to be a dress rehearsal.

The girls are taking it with good humor. Stetson is giving her Baby Spice bright-pink eyeshadow. Decadence slides on a handmade, leopard-printed halter jumpsuit, then agonizes over which necklace — oversized teardrop gemstones? heavy industrial gold chains? — would better complement the ensemble that helps make her a convincing Scary Spice. Jones has brought an array of dresses and skirts that could work for Posh Spice — a black-leather number that draws nods of approval. She gazes at herself in the mirror, analyzing the length of the minidress.

“This could go shorter,” she says. “Should we have a hem party?”

There’s a laugh, and Banks — decked out in a mint-green tracksuit for her role as Sporty Spice — disappears to fetch shots for everybody. When she reappears, I realize something rather startling about her appearance: The beard is gone.

“I’ve spent the last year really branding myself as a bearded drag queen,” she says with a gentle toss of her dark wig, “but I could not say no to doing this again, and I decided to shave for it.”

A few nights earlier, as snow began to whitewash Broadway, I’d met Chambers at Hamburger Mary’s. LaFave was there, dressed in street clothes, a beautifully maintained black beard adorning his face. Getting rid of it wasn’t necessarily a requirement, he tells me now, but he was assuming a new character.

“I mean, we’re playing characters as drag queens, but we’re also playing Spice Girls,” he says, “so I am Heidi Banks as Sporty Spice, and people still get it. They still get the look [of Sporty Spice], but they get a little bit of me as well.”

It was Chambers who originally dreamed up this Spice Girls revue, having heard about a drag-king group in another city that put on a One Direction show a couple of years earlier. The 2015 Spice Girls Dragtacular quickly fell into place — and, following the enthusiastic reception last year, it made sense, Chambers says, to mount for two shows in 2016. This is, after all, the 20th anniversary of “Wannabe,” the Spice Girls’ breakthrough hit.

“It’s not your everyday drag show,” Chambers says. He sits at the bar at Mary’s, wearing a striped knit sweater and drinking a Bud Light, his face scrubbed clean of makeup. “It’s not a hosted drag show — it’s a concert-style experience. You’re essentially going to a Spice Girls concert without, obviously, the actual Spice Girls. It’s big. There will be costume changes and wig changes. We’re doing all the hits as well as some songs that you may not know. You’re going to get a little bit of everything.”

If it sounds elaborate, that’s the idea — though not as elaborate as the group might wish. Chambers explains, “The idea behind it is kind of similar to the return of the Spice Girls that they did in ’07 and ’08, but logistically, you know, we had to scale that down. We’ve only got three costume changes, and you could do more, but we don’t have a staff to help us with that. We don’t have a hundred hands behind the scenes. It’s just five of us.”

That keeps the behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts fairly unglamorous. But then again, Chambers says, drag might not really be about glamor at all.

“When I first started [in 2007], it was around the recession, and there was a shift in the audience,” he says. “People wanted more entertainment. Like, you’re not just going up there in a gown and doing a ballad. You’re not just a person that people are looking at — you’re the person that’s throwing a party, and these people are here to party with you.”

For LaFave, there is a personal attachment in embodying one of the most treasured pop acts of the ’90s.

“I grew up with the Spice Girls,” he says. “I love girl groups anyway, but they were big artists in pop music then, and as a closeted gay man or confused adolescent — even though their whole thing was girl power — it was easy to see them and still feel empowered by them. So there’s that link for me. And then I just love their music.”

For Chambers, the event is all about recapturing that “girl power.”

“You’re always on Cloud 9 when you’re out onstage, whether it’s five people or 10 or hundreds looking at you,” he says. “You’re making people smile, and from the first show I ever did, that’s what it was about: Letting people forget, even for 10 seconds, their troubles for the day. The best outcome — at least for the Spice Girls — is that everyone has enjoyed themselves, sung along with us and relived their youth a little, even if that feeling only lasts for the hour and 45 minutes we’re up there.”