Joey Arias and Basil Twist Do the Time Warp
Arias with a Twist is back in the theater where it debuted in 2008. Raven Snook speaks with the creators about bringing their puppet-and-song extravaganza out of storage and back to HERE Arts Center.
Joey Arias as the “vampy vocalist” who is “sent to hell before finally returning to Earth where he stomps through Midtown à la Goddess-zilla” in Arias with a Twist, returning 18 years after its debut. Photo: Richard Termine.
In August, I was rushing to a show at HERE Arts Center when I spied a set piece being repainted outside the venue that catapulted me into the past. It was an intricate silhouette of the Manhattan skyline that I immediately recognized from Arias with a Twist, a breathtaking fantasia I saw almost two decades ago that’s being remounted by its genre-nonconforming creators: drag cabaret legend Joey Arias and puppet master Basil Twist.
A lot has changed since their celebrated spectacle premiered at HERE’s intimate basement theater in 2008—for the artists, for the city they call home, and for us all. Twist won a MacArthur Fellowship; became a sought-after puppeteer on Broadway, the West End, and beyond; and married Cats: The Jellicle Ball alum Ken Ard at a wedding officiated by Arias.
Ever the busy performer, Arias donated his archives to Harvard’s Houghton Library, got married and divorced, and got sober thanks to an intervention staged by friends, including Twist. (“I was living the life of Billie Holiday,” Arias says, invoking the name of the deceased jazz singer he’s famous for channeling.)
Meanwhile, hypergentrification has reshaped New York City, making it an inhospitable home for many, especially artists; gender-bending has become an international pastime thanks in large part to RuPaul’s Drag Race; social media has isolated us with the illusion of connection; and AI seems poised to eradicate analog creativity and, perhaps, humanity itself.
That is exactly why the duo believes audiences need Arias with a Twist right now.
“A whole new generation is going to see this homemade artistry and imagination,” says Arias about their surreal, song-and-puppet-filled adventure, in which the vampy vocalist is abducted and probed by aliens; dumped on a lush, flower-filled planet; and sent to hell before finally returning to Earth where he stomps through Midtown à la Goddess-zilla. “It’s not CGI or AI or store-bought. Basil and his amazing puppeteers have made this whole incredible set. I think this show pulls back the veil to reveal the avant-garde on a beautiful, high level. We’re like the last of this.”
Drag cabaret legend Joey Arias (left) and puppeteer Basil Twist created Arias with a Twist in 2008, and “we just want to do this beautiful, fun, sexy, joyous show,” says Twist. Photo: Steve Menendez.
Twist agrees. “It just felt timely for many reasons,” he says. “There’s an exciting new leadership team at HERE, and I’m still doing the puppetry program and the Puppet Festival after 30 years, so I’m part of the theater’s legacy. While I’ve been doing lots of cool projects like My Neighbor Totoro or The Monkey King, they’re not really my projects. There’s a longing I have for doing what I used to do, which is these outrageous shows that nobody asked for, and all of Arias with a Twist has just been sitting in my storage upstate.”
And then, of course, there’s the state of the world, which, Twist says, “actually feels way more dire than it did when George W. Bush was in office. We don’t want to address that directly. We just want to do this beautiful, fun, sexy, joyous show.”
Rewatching this gloriously low-tech high-art extravaganza is like going on multiple time warps at once. It’s being performed where it debuted 18 years ago, in HERE’s cozy Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, named after Twist’s grandmother. The show itself fuses aesthetics from different decades of the last century. The opening band puppets hail from the 1930s and belonged to Twist’s grandfather, a bandleader and puppeteer himself. The aliens recall the UFO craze of the ’40s. Decked out in the late Thierry Mugler’s S&M bodysuit and a black wig with bangs, Arias resembles ’50s pinup Bettie Page, and the jungle scene is straight out of the psychedelic ’60s.
Somehow, experienced all together, the show feels like quintessential East Village aughts, back when the neighborhood was a hotbed of scrappy invention and outré creativity, not an endless bar crawl. As fabulous as Arias with a Twist still is, it’s a bittersweet nostalgia trip, a yearning for what once was, resurrected temporarily.
After admiring each other’s work for many years, Twist originally pitched Arias on this collaboration in 2008, and it quickly transformed from fever dream to reality. “I still marvel at how we pulled it off,” Twist recalls. “I work on projects now and you need at least a year to do anything, and that’s not even enough time.”
For Arias with a Twist, he says, “We went from, ‘Do you want to do a show?’ to opening night in like three or four months. We just talked, shared some ideas, and then made this show that had this wonderful, beautiful through line and this great vibe. Now, it’s like we’ve excavated King Tut’s tomb or something. It’s this couture gown of a show that fits not only Joey but this space, and it’s amazing to see that all start to vibrate again.”
Arias with the opening band puppets, which are from the 1930s and belonged to Twist’s grandfather. Photo: Richard Termine.
For this revival, a word Arias dislikes—“It sounds like you’re going to an old gospel church. It’s not a revival. It’s timeless!”—the pair needed a lot more than a few months. The impetus to bring back the show came out of a conversation with a potential producer two years ago. “I was like, ‘Well, I’m busy doing this opera in San Francisco, and then I’m doing this other thing. I could do it in 2026,’ Twist says. “I went and did my things. And as 2026 approached, I was like, ‘I guess maybe we should do this.’”
Arias says all around the world he meets Arias with a Twist fans, and so far, attendees for this engagement have included pop icon Cyndi Lauper, talk show queen Ricki Lake, music legend David Byrne, and South Park cocreator Matt Stone. That’s quite an impressive turnout for the show and for Arias, who’s marking his 50th anniversary of arriving in New York to reinvent himself as the diva we know today.
One added bit of fun: on October 31, Arias will serve as the grand marshal of the 53rd annual Village Halloween Parade, with Twist overseeing a special Year of the Horse celebration featuring dancing firehorse puppets.
While Arias with a Twist serves as a sort of time capsule, it’s also a reminder of the ephemeral nature of performance and people. Two artists involved in the original iteration, costumer Mugler and puppeteer Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith, have passed on though their presence is still felt in the production. Twist added a curtain to the cavalcade of opening drapery in honor of Abromaitis-Smith.
“That’s part of the passage of time,” concedes Twist about losing loved ones. “We’re still here and we’re alive and we have all this stuff and it’s sparkly and ready to go. And we have this space so let’s put on a show. The possibility and opportunity that we have is not to be squandered.”
And they’re not. “Everywhere I go, I’ve been dropping the card off,” Arias says about his appropriately old-fashioned way of promoting the project. “I walk down the street and people are like, ‘Joey! What are you doing these days?’ And I give them a card and they’re like, ‘Are you shitting me? You guys are doing this again? I’m so glad.’”