DAY OF THE DEAD, NIGHT OF THE LIVING to Play FRIGID Nightcap

FRIGID Nightcap will return to UNDER St. Marks on Friday, October 30 at 9:30 PM with DAY OF THE DEAD, NIGHT OF THE LIVING, a special edition of the monthly late-night variety show presented as part of FRIGID New York's Days of the Dead festival.

Built around the tagline 'Still here. Still queer. Not done.', the October show explores inheritance, ancestry, memory, unfinished business, survival, and what the living choose to carry forward from the generations that came before them.

The premise begins with a simple idea: the dead leave behind more than memories. They leave traditions, art, dreams, debts, wounds, systems, stories, and unfinished work. For a little while, all of it belongs to the living. What deserves to be preserved? What should be transformed? What ought to stay buried? And what will the next generation eventually inherit from us?

Because this edition is part of Days of the Dead, Nightcap has placed particular emphasis on work by Mexican and Mexican-heritage artists engaging with ancestry, cultural inheritance, family, identity, and transformation from their own perspectives.

The Lineup

The lineup includes Emiliano Reyna's !HERMANO JUSTICE!, an original Mexican-American superhero comedy combining theatre, comic-book mythology, family dynamics, luchador imagery, and live electric guitar.

Reyna begins the piece as an apparently ordinary young man who discovers a stop sign and transforms himself into the blue-spandex, luchador-masked Hermano Justice. Convinced that the sign is Captain America's shield, he vows to travel to New York, find the Avengers, locate his missing father, and defeat the evil responsible for taking him away. His heroic monologue is underscored live by guitarist Mauricio Bernal-until a call from his mother abruptly brings the fantasy back down to earth.

Also appearing is Criis Vega with Catrina Folklórica, featuring Vega's non-binary Catrina character Skelita Calaveras, Queen of Mictlán. The piece blends musical theatre with Mexican folkloric dance traditions associated with Oaxaca and Veracruz as Skelita recounts their rise through the underworld toward the throne of Mictlán. The performance concludes with folkloric dance drawing from a range of Mexican musical traditions.

Brooklyn-based queer Latina comedian Adrienne Gomez brings stand-up shaped by her experiences with family, dating, politics, and contemporary queer life. Gomez is also the host and producer of Sizzling Singles, a queer comedy dating show at Ginger's Bar celebrating its second anniversary this October.

Burlesque and sideshow performer Faxtra Larq will perform Recuerdos, a dance and burlesque piece conceived as an ode to loved ones who have passed away. The act moves from remembrance and tenderness into classic sideshow territory, culminating in a staple-gun sequence involving flower petals-a combination of memorial imagery, bodily risk, and theatrical spectacle that places grief and danger side by side.

Nightcap regulars The Strange Girlzz will also return with their distinctive mix of movement, devised theatre, performance art, comedy, and unpredictable downtown surrealism.

The evening will additionally feature OpenStage, Nightcap's short-form performance platform that brings additional artists into the room and gives the show an element of deliberate unpredictability.

Together, the lineup embodies Nightcap's broader variety-show philosophy: forms that might rarely appear on the same bill are placed in direct conversation with one another. A superhero origin story can sit beside Mexican folkloric dance; stand-up can give way to burlesque and sideshow; ritual, comedy, live music, theatre, and performance art can all become different responses to the same thematic question.

DAY OF THE DEAD, NIGHT OF THE LIVING also marks a tonal shift within the larger Days of the Dead framework. Rather than focusing exclusively on death or mourning, this edition turns toward the people who remain-and the temporary responsibility of being alive.

The show asks audiences and performers alike to consider what they have inherited, what remains unfinished, what deserves another life, and what should be passed forward.

FRIGID Nightcap is a monthly late-night variety show at UNDER St. Marks featuring a rotating mix of comedy, drag, burlesque, music, dance, theatre, circus, sideshow, performance art, and experimental work. Each edition is built around a new theme designed to give radically different artists a common point of departure while leaving plenty of room for unexpected interpretations.

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