At Chappell Roan’s Super Graphic Spectacular, the sincerely camp pop star imagines a world where the most vulnerable among us aren’t wielded as scapegoats, and where life can be good, so long as we are good to one another.
That better world takes the form of a two-night extravaganza at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, part kiki ball, part fabulous revue, celebrating the first anniversary of the Midwest Princess Project, the non-profit Roan founded in 2025 to support transgender youth and LGBTQ+ communities.
Named after her breakout album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, the non-profit has raised more than $800,000 and supported more than 60 organizations in its first year. Its work extends the promise at the heart of Roan’s music: that queer people, particularly those who grew up feeling estranged from their surroundings, can find somewhere to belong. For an artist whose rise has been inseparable from the extravagant performance of identity, the event offers a way to translate that feeling of collective recognition into practical support.
The Shrine Auditorium, with a capacity of about 6,300, is at least 10 times smaller than the crowds Roan usually plays to. The bill, however, is hardly modest. Pop stars Lola Young and Tinashe share the stage with drag acts and burlesque performers whose influence on Roan’s gleefully excessive presentation is unmistakable. Hosting the festivities is Caleb Hearon, everyone’s favorite algorithm-touted gay guy. “Why’s a man here? It feels like Chappell doing Make-A-Wish,” he jokes at the beginning of the night.
On the first of the two nights, straight men are in the minority. They dangle from the arms of their fabulous girlfriends, who wear sequins and cowboy hats, like accessories themselves, dressed in black bandanas and Spider-Man tees. Both groups queue for the same bathroom. “Restrooms are non-binary tonight,” a security attendant announces. Roan has not skimped on a single detail.
She has transformed the Shrine into a rococo burlesque ballroom, its gilded scrollwork set against great, swooping red velvet curtains. Blaine Petrovia, the night’s opening act, slides down a tall pole at the center of the stage, executing extravagant, sensual flourishes in a slutty circus routine.
There is hardly a pause between the night’s five acts as Hearon ushers performers on and offstage, vamping about straight men (why are they all fake photographers?) and straight women (ditto, but witches?).
Lola Young, the first of the night’s two guest singers, takes the stage in what might be called normal-people drag, looking a little out of place. She performs just three songs, closing with her hit Messy. An extraordinary vocalist still early in her career, Young has yet to master stage presence or crowd management, though her awkwardness remains charming, much as it did when PinkPantheress used to sheepishly carry a bag on stage.
The house band remains the same throughout, presumably to lend the night some cohesion, but Roan’s two guest singers struggle to distinguish themselves from it. The coherence of Roan’s universe is also its limitation: the show is so thoroughly organized around her sensibility that its glammed-up, exaggerated arrangements don’t quite work for everyone. Tinashe, the night’s second guest singer, is a case in point.
Tinashe’s latest album, for my money one of the best of the year, is supremely chic. Here, the band distorts its sleekness into chintz. It’s a testament to Tinashe’s deftness as a performer that she rises to the occasion, delivering Roan-filtered versions of her songs with ease, but the crowd doesn’t quite respond in kind. When she sings Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore, the audience largely proves her right. Devastatingly, that is one of the only two (two!) songs Tinashe is allotted.
The space made for Roan proves worthwhile when the headliner launches into an extraordinary hour-and-a-half set. It confirms her status as one of the greatest performers in pop, and possibly in any genre, working today. She emerges relatively understated, by her standards, in a gray gown, with a long red fishtail woven into her hair.
Roan’s world is one of ballroom, drag, glam rock, girlhood splendor and sex. She hiccups her way through Midwest Princess hits – Femininomenon, Casual and Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl – without a hair out of place.
By now, Roan’s production is so perfected that the cracks that peek through tonight feel graciously illuminating. Several songs into her set, she begins to look noticeably nervous, taking swigs from her lilac Stanley cup, forgetting lyrics and smiling diffidently. “I have a surprise,” she announces, telling the crowd that she is about to bring out a guest who has “paved the way”. Cyndi Lauper? I think. Madonna, if we’re being incredibly ambitious.
Then Christina Aguilera appears in black lingerie, and Roan, who has spent the evening functioning with the precision of the well-oiled Femininomenon she is, suddenly becomes a giggling fan. Aguilera sings Beautiful, accompanied by piano, while Roan watches from the bench in disbelief.
There is something especially moving about hearing a song you have taken for granted, through sheer ubiquity, suddenly acquire a new resonance. As Aguilera sings Beautiful to a predominantly queer audience, the familiar becomes elemental again. “Words won’t bring you down.”
Roan appears charmingly nervous as the two duet her indie-folk ballad Coffee, forgetting her words again and regaining her composure only after Aguilera leaves the stage. Then she becomes the slick, precise performer again, leading the crowd into the YMCA’s sexier, uncloseted cousin, Hot to Go!
She closes with the song that traces her escape from her conservative Missouri upbringing into a world of her own making. In Los Angeles, surrounded by fabulous gays, Pink Pony Club needs little explanation. Pink confetti bursts overhead, and the fantasy she once sang about is no longer somewhere else. It is here.
