Skank Sinatra

This elegant, super convivial drag queen is the poster girl for Qtopia’s inaugural Pride Fest running through June.  Skank Sinatra of course has her own show, singing works of Sinatra and his contemporaries, adjusted to her own lewd lyrics. 

Her sparkling costumes suggests that 1950-60s cocktail circuit, adding a shine to the new intimate Loading Dock theatre in what was the old Darlinghurst cop shop.  And Skank (nothing is skanky about her) is a lithe, agile entertainer, an immaculate looker, who from the start never lets up sucking out our applause.

Life wasn’t always this good.  As she shares, young Jens Radda arrived here with his family from South Africa and eventually settled in the very white bread territory of the Gold Coast (cue “I Still Call Australia Home”). 

He escaped west to study stardom at WAAPA (cue “New York, New York” downgraded to “Perth, Perth”), struggled in Melbourne dives, and teases us with her wild nights through Berlin.  

She never made it to Broadway, but in gay Sydney Skank fell for her current boyfriend/girlfriend: a tradie by day, a fellow drag queen by night. (Cue “I only want to be with You”).  Their home life is sometimes fraught, certainly competitive; we could have heard more of these intimacies.

But she’s a master/mistress of the keyboard, especially after changing into white and evoking Marilyn Monroe singing “The Lady is a Tramp”. And between witty camaraderie she again matches her namesake with That’s Life. She’s worth catching.

Martin Portus

Images: Fudz Qazi.

https://qtopiasydney.com.au/pride-fest-2025/