Bob Frame and Lypsinka (John Epperson) | Anything Goes / 1991

golden day, olden days

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lypsinka (performer), Bob Frame (director) Anything Goes / 1991

 

Like a few of the early drag artists, the 1980s, 1990s performer Lypsinka (John Epperson), who began his career as a pianist at The American Ballet, prefers to be described as an actor.   

     Anything Goes, performed in 1991 at a nightclub in the West 40s in Manhattan, quite brilliant displays Epperson / Lypsinka’s talent, as she sings a jazz medley of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes dressed in a Dietrichesque rhinestone gown, but also playing a Vernoica Lake-like beauty surrounded by several handsome gay boys, a cigarette girl, a 1960s mod customer, also surrounded by men, and a 1920s era vamp in the manner of Nazimova.

     The truly handsome gay boys, businessmen, sailors, and officer are played by Robert Floydd, Tony G., Joel, Tony, and Jack.

     Although we know that Lypsinka is merely mouthing the words from a version by Lisa Kirk who performed in several Broadway musicals such as Kiss Me Kate and sang regularly in clubs and other venues in Manhattan throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, someone not in know might certainly be convinced that Lypsinka was actually singing along with her sexy dance-like moves. But the point in nearly all of Lypsinka’s work is that she is a grand illusion of the female in the manner perhaps of highly trimmed-down, buxomless, pencil thin Mae West or even Bette Midler, but with the style of a true diva.

     Frame’s 1991 version of her theater pizzaz as well as her many-faced illusions of female greats is nearly perfect. More than an imitator, Epperson as Lypsinka becomes one of the female legends.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).