New Wave Cabaret knew Tim Curry deserved a burlesque show long before they knew it would also become a goodbye.
The Orlando burlesque and drag production company first conceived of Spicy Curry: A Tim Curry Burlesque Tribute in late 2024, back when its producers were mapping out their first slate of shows. Curry’s body of work seemed tailor-made for their stage, as an actor whose career could jump from camp to horror, fantasy to comedy and still find room to be strange, flamboyant, villainous, sexy or some combination thereof.
Then Curry died on Aug. 25, and a production originally designed to celebrate his career suddenly took on another purpose.
“We had been planning this as a celebration of his work, never imagining that it would become a tribute to his life and legacy as well,” New Wave producer Kimbolicious tells Orlando Weekly. “It makes the show feel much more bittersweet now.”
“We’re out to have the grief deepen the experience rather than define it.”
But don’t expect Saturday’s Spicy Curry to be a wake.
Kimolicious says the company remains committed to the production they originally envisioned — campy, theatrical, weird, sexy, funny and joyful — even if a little more emotion is now underpinning it.
“We’re still very committed to making Spicy Curry a celebration of Tim Curry and his incredible body of work, rather than turning it into a funeral of sorts,” she says.
Producer Hans Von StrangeLove puts it another way: “We’re out to have the grief deepen the experience rather than define it.”
For an actor who spent decades capturing new audiences through wildly different corners of pop culture, this is particularly fitting.
Ask one person about Curry and they might immediately picture the fishnets and corset of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Someone else might see Wadsworth frantically navigating the halls of Clue, Pennywise peeking out from a storm drain in It, or hear him through character voices like Hexxus in FernGully or Nigel Thornberry.
“You can tell a lot about a person by what they know Tim Curry from,” New Wave joked in announcing the show.
Kimbolicious was first introduced to the late actor after watching Clue. She remembers repeatedly watching VHS recordings her mother made from HBO as a child, years before she knew anything about the actor playing Wadsworth. It wasn’t until a friend introduced her to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a teenager that the pieces came together.
“For some people, he’s connected to their childhood; for others, he represents a formative moment of queer awakening,” she says.
That enormous filmography also gave New Wave a particularly strange problem while assembling Spicy Curry: There were almost too many possibilities to choose from.
Performers pitched characters from across Curry’s career, including expected favorites and considerably deeper cuts. The final production pulls from horror, fantasy, comedy, animation and even videogames, creating opportunities for the audience to experience at least a few moments of, “Oh my God, I forgot he was in that.”
But re-creating those characters isn’t really the point.
“We’re not trying to cosplay Tim Curry’s performances,” Kimbolicious says. “We’re amplifying what made those performances so memorable to us.”
That distinction is key to how New Wave approaches pop culture through drag and burlesque. A familiar character might provide the starting point, but each performer decides which detail to exaggerate or make their own.
Producer Leggy StrangeLove describes both forms as taking certain qualities and turning them “up to 10,” with each artist deciding which piece of a familiar character deserves a magnifying glass.
For Hans Von StrangeLove, the process becomes almost a conversation between the performer and everything an audience already knows about the source.
“Burlesque is an opportunity to conduct an orchestra of cultural references, including your own,” he says.
Spicy Curry also arrives at a considerably different moment for New Wave Cabaret itself.
When Orlando Weekly first spoke with the company last year, New Wave had yet to stage its debut production, Let’s Dance: A David Bowie Burlesque Tribute. The producers were attempting to create the kind of queer-forward performance space they felt was missing — one that allowed drag, burlesque and other forms of performance to exist alongside one another without worrying too much about which table they were assigned.
A year later, three of New Wave’s first four productions have sold out.
Even more telling to its producers, some of the same audience members kept coming back.
Kimbolicious remembers wondering whether the company’s first sellout was partially the result of Bowie’s enormous built-in following. Then attendees from the Bowie tribute appeared again for the Happy Holigays and once more for The G@g Ball.
“They weren’t just showing up for the theme,” she tells Orlando Weekly. “They were showing up because they trusted us to put on a good show with lots of heart.”
For Leggy, those returning faces — along with messages from attendees who say they weren’t expecting to laugh, cry or feel quite as much as they did — have become evidence that New Wave is building something that lasts beyond any one theme.
“Our audiences return in part, I think, because they truly feel something in a deep way,” they say.
That might make Spicy Curry an unusually fitting beginning to the company’s second season.
The night of Saturday, Sept. 26, brings together performers — including Aurora Fable, Feisty Fringe, Buttercup Sunset, Daya Darling, Velvet Thing and many more — and fans who became familiar with Curry’s work from completely different places, but who now share the added weight of celebrating it after his death. New Wave is allowing grief to hold hands with the joy that made the show worth planning in the first place. The company dedicates itself to creating space for people to be a little more themselves — and there isn’t a more appropriate way to do it.
“Queer joy is an act of resistance,” Kimbolicious tells Orlando Weekly, “and each time we come together in this way, we’re making a difference together.”
8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26, Marshall Ellis Performing Arts Center, 1300 La Quinta Drive, metheatre.com, $30.$47.
