ARCADIA NEON to Make Its Debut at FRIGID Nightcap's Queerly Festival

FRIGID Nightcap, NYC's weirdest late-night variety show, will return to Under St. Marks this June with ARCADIA NEON, a special edition presented as part of FRIGID's Queerly Festival.

Inspired by Queerly's 2026 theme, 'Then, Now, and Always,' ARCADIA NEON imagines a queer mythic future under electric light - a glowing world where ancient desire, classical myth, queer history, nightlife, ritual, fantasy, and impossible futures all collide.

The evening will take place at Under St. Marks in the East Village on Friday, June 26th at 10:30pm. Tickets are available at bit.ly/FRIGIDNightcapTix.

Each month, FRIGID Nightcap brings together a wildly eclectic lineup of performers for a true late-night variety show, blending drag, burlesque, comedy, music, theatre, performance art, dance, games, audience surprises, and whatever beautiful chaos emerges from the basement. Hosted and produced by Edward Gibbons-Brown, the show has become a recurring home for artists whose work does not fit neatly into one category.

For its Queerly Festival edition, Nightcap will lean fully into myth, history, futurism, and queer spectacle.

'Queerly's theme, 'Then, Now, and Always,' immediately made me think about queerness across time,' said Gibbons-Brown. 'Not just in the present, and not just as something we're fighting for in the future, but as something that has always been there - in myth, in history, in classical stories, in nightlife, in performance, in the stories we inherit and reinvent. With ARCADIA NEON, we're taking those traces and building a glowing queer future out of them.'

The lineup will feature The Strange Girlzz, Angus Beef, Ethan Aphrodite, and Artina Darkly.

The Strange Girlzz will bring their signature blend of movement, dialogue, dance theatre, comedy, femme-centered performance, and reality-bending chaos to the Under St. Marks stage. Acting as the portal into the world of ARCADIA NEON, The Strange Girlzz will help open the evening with a strange, theatrical initiation into the glowing ruins.

Angus Beef will perform an act that brings glamour, grief, memory, and resurrection into the heart of the theme. A queer relic, a bejeweled corpse, and a sacred reminder that the queer archive is full of bodies, stories, and legends that were never meant to stay buried, Angus's performance explores the haunted space between history, mourning, camp, and survival.

Ethan Aphrodite will present The Digital Gladiator, a draglesque spectacle where Greco-Roman mythology meets algorithmic futurism. Ancient empire collides with modern technology as the Fall of Rome gets a ring light, asking what happens when the gods get WiFi and the colosseum becomes the algorithm.

Artina Darkly will bring mythic desire, divine seduction, and goddess-level burlesque to the evening. With an act inspired by Aphrodite after dark, Artina will close the night with beauty, danger, erotic mythology, and a little ancient trouble.

Together, the lineup creates a world of glowing ruins, digital gladiators, haunted archives, femme ritual, divine seduction, and queer futurity. The result is a late-night performance event that is lush, strange, funny, sensual, and defiantly alive.

'This is not nostalgia,' Gibbons-Brown added. 'It's not historical reenactment. It's the queer archive plugged into the wall. It's the past remixed, the future queered, and the present made just a little more fluorescent.'

More on Under St. Marks

Upcoming Shows

FRIGID Nightcap: ARCADIA NEON

6/26 - 6/26/2026

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