From dreams to drag to star role
NEVER the leading man, Trevor Ashley finds he can feel beautiful in a dress.
WE rarely grow up to be what we aspired to as three-year-olds; otherwise the world would be crammed with astronauts and fairies, and no one to do their taxes. However, some kids are more focused than others. Trevor Ashley, who is about to appear in Hairspray as the overweight shut-in mother Edna Turnblad, did not specify as a toddler that he wanted to be a drag queen. But, from an age when most of us contemplated the merits of plasticine, he was stating categorically that he wanted to be a performer.
Such was Sydney-born Ashley’s pester power that at 30 – as he is about to tackle a role previously inhabited by Divine, John Travolta and Harvey Fierstein – he has been in show business for 26 years.
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He made his television debut at four, sitting next to Johnny Young and singing Love Makes the World Go Round. His mother then located the Shopfront Theatre for young people, and from the age of five to 15 Ashley spent every weekend there, soaking up skills like a sponge and going on a three-month tour of the Pacific rim when he was 10.
“I know, it’s insane. I look back now and think, I was so young. What was I thinking? But it’s all I ever wanted,” says the luminously sunny Ashley, who had the role of Miss Understanding written for him in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical, and has moved to Melbourne in anticipation of a long run of Hairspray at the Princess Theatre.
Ashley’s determination was even odder given that he came from a family who made only the occasional excursion to the theatre. His father was a company secretary for architecture firms, his mother stayed at home, and his younger brother manages and sets up gyms.
“As short and fat and gay as I am, he’s tall and blond and muscly. We’re almost like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins,” Ashley says. “My friend Mitzi always says I’m the pink sheep of the family. My grandfather loved musicals, though, and has an amazing record collection; first editions of every musical since the 1950s. I was into Cats, Barbra Streisand, loved them. I played them incessantly.”
His Year 12 at Sydney Technical High School was dizzying: two musicals, the Schools Spectacular, playing trumpet with the stage band and concert band, piano with the state school big band (including a US tour and writing the orchestrations), and playing with the allstars big band.
Leaving school didn’t slow him down. He won the Sydney Cabaret Festival at 18 and the Campbelltown Catholic Club Star Search. With the prize money he took his cabaret show Trevor: The Arena Mega Musical to New York and bought a third-row ticket to Streisand. His most recent show, I’m Every Woman, sold out 11 shows at the Sydney Opera House before it opened.
It hardly seems surprising that Ashley has landed the lead in a mega-hit mainstream musical. But as the DeVito of his family, it has been an unorthodox route, and body image is something he’s battled with.
“I never considered myself, as a boy, a very attractive person,” he says. “I’ve never thought, ‘Oh wow, you know, god, I’m really good-looking.’ My mother told me often, from a very young age, ‘You’ll never be the leading man, will you?’ I always knew I’m not the good-looking one, which is why I learned to be funny.
“What I found interesting, when I started doing drag, was realising how much I could change my physical appearance. I find getting into sequins and feathers makes me feel beautiful. I think that’s the big thing, I feel much more beautiful in drag, even as Edna Turnblad.”
Edna, Tracy Turnblad’s mother, is so mortified by her own weight that she hasn’t left the house in years and lives vicariously through TV. It is Edna who goes through the greatest transformation in the show, eventually feeling good about herself and letting herself be loved.
“I love her vulnerability,” Ashley says. “I guess that it’s mirrored my own journey. She’s so paranoid about her weight and looks and how the world sees her, and we all have that. It’s about finding ways of making yourself feel beautiful. Edna finds it through the love of her husband. I’ve found it through doing drag.”
Originally, Ashley never considered drag. He was pursuing a purist career as a cabaret performer, and was reviewed very well in New York. Then 9/11 happened and returning was no longer viable. Drag queen Portia Turbo saw him perform, suggested he try it and mentored him through the process. Because he could sing, Ashley’s drag career took off like a scalded cat and as Cleopatra Coupe he worked 10 shows a week for four years on the Sydney gay pub circuit.
It transformed his career in unexpected ways.
“If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d sell out the Opera House impersonating Liza, Shirley and Judy, I would have laughed at you. The thing I learned the most from doing drag is that if you’re working in a pub, especially to gay men who don’t care, if you want their attention, or to get applause, you have to come up with something really clever, or funny, or do the stuff people want to hear. You’ve got to work harder.
“The penny dropped for me doing the pubs. I’d been doing cabaret shows, which meant I had a captive audience, and I wouldn’t be caught dead singing anything which people might actually know. I was a complete snob, only singing obscure songs that I thought were important. Doing drag made me go, ‘Hold on, who am I doing this for again?’ “
His experience in drag (and his comic timing) led to him landing the role of Edna: traditionally a “dame” role that has gone to big names such as Divine, Travolta or Fierstein. At the final audition it was down to Ashley and four household names he’s too courteous to identify.
“I was shit-scared,” he says. “Everyone else was a star and there was me. I thought: Why am I even here? But for most of them, it was their first time in drag, and they were quite uncomfortable. I’d done my own make-up, brought my own wig, my own fat suit.”
He is gratified that the producers have faith in him. “But none of the cast [is a] big [name],” he says. “It’s exciting. It goes back, perhaps, to making stars rather than cashing in on them.”
In Ashley’s dressing-room at the Princess Theatre he has hung a photo of himself, aged 10, taken with Rob Guest in full Phantom make-up. In the exact same dressing-room. “Twenty years ago: me as this kid, dreaming that one day this will be my dressing-room and I’ll be the star of the show. And here we are. This is a lovely thing, to think I’ve done it.”
Hairspray opens at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne on Saturday.