Note: PrideArts announced Dec. 12 that, due to circumstances beyond its control, the final three performances of Rapornzel (Dec. 12, 13 and 14) had been canceled.
Rapornzel, PrideArts’s 2025 holiday ‘panto’ performance, characteristically delves deep into fairy-tale lore and comes back up with a script combining the centuries-old tale of the princess with the famous coif with cheeky references to—in no particular order—BDSM, oral sex, pubic hair, masturbation, voyeurism and DeKalb, Illinois.
As in previous years, the script by Tom Whalley takes the English pantomime tradition and queers it up, and this show won’t win any points for subtlety. It’s not the hair on Rapornzel’s (Hannah Efsits) head that is hanging down from the tower she’s imprisoned in by the evil Mother Fucker (Gina Cioffi, who stole the show).
Rapornzel does not know that she’s really the daughter of King Merkin of Upper Muff (Dave Kelch, always entering with the 20th Century-Fox fanfare), and is in Mother Fucker’s charge thanks to one of those royal slights so apt to trigger fairy tale witches. As long as Mother Fucker brushes Rapornzel’s pubic hair daily (yeah, really), she maintains her own eternal youth and beauty. So, Mother Fucker’s really invested in keeping Rapornzel in that tower.
Along for this ride are Prince Ride-Her (Bryan Fowler), who spends much of Act II in Mother Fucker’s ‘fungeon’; Hairy Fairy Dandruff (Jeremy Cox), who’d make Truman Capote seem butch; and the mother-son duo of Dame Fanny Follicle (Peter Moeller) and Pascal the Rascal (Charlotte Harris), proprietors of a local hair salon, Curl Up and Dye (The Blues Brothers beat Whalley to that joke). Much of the action is punctuated by musical numbers mostly based on ‘70s and ‘80s standards, and the musical finale, “The 12 Days of Fist-mas” is worth the price of admission alone.
The opening night crew kept things going at a good clip, though sometimes it felt like the performers were struggling with the pacing—Harris, who narrates and as Pascal must keep the audience engaged, was sometimes difficult to hear. Efsits, Moeller and Cox were all terrific though, and one nice thing about these pantos is that by the time you realized that a joke hasn’t landed, they’ve thrown about five more at you that do. One weakness of Whalley’s scripts though is that he tends to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, sometimes favoring the cheapest laughs over real wit (he could have thought of a better name for a witch than Mother Fucker), but that’s par for the course when writing in this format.
Director Claire Hart Proepper stages the action well (kudos to all responsible for Rapornzel and Mother Fucker’s Matrix-style showdown at the end), and I’m looking forward to seeing how well PrideArts makes use of its new home, Center on Halsted’s Hoover-Leppen Theatre. A few stumbles aside, Rapornzel makes for a vulgar good time that will keep you laughing and forget the outside world for a few hours.
Rapornzel is showing at the Hoover-Leppen Theatre at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St. through Dec. 14. Information and tickets are available here.