Previews: ARIAS WITH A TWIST at Here Arts Center

There are shows you see once, treasure, and file away as an artifact of a particular downtown moment that could never happen again. And then, every couple of decades, one of them proves you wrong. Arias with a Twist, back at HERE Arts Center in the very theater where it detonated in 2008, is not a nostalgia trip. It is a resurrection, and it is glorious.

In 2008, I wrote: "There is NOTHING in New York quite like Arias with a Twist." Twenty years later, I am writing it again, and it is still true, and somehow it is truer. This is fresher than ever, more timely than ever, and — impossibly — funnier than ever.

The show's DNA hasn't changed, and thank god for that. It opens, as it always has, with Joey Arias getting abducted by aliens, and from that first blast of light and sound, you understand you are not in a theater so much as inside somebody's fabulously unhinged fever dream. Joey Arias, veteran of Wigstock and Club 57, fresh off years as mistress of ceremonies for Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity in Las Vegas, is paired here with Basil Twist, the puppet-theater wizard who made his name with the underwater spectacle Symphonie Fantastique in this very space. Twenty years on, that pairing still feels like a lightning strike nobody could have engineered on purpose.

Arias descends from her alien encounter as a puppet, plummeting to earth and landing — where else — in a Garden of Eden that has clearly never heard of innocence. She bites into a gleaming, sequined mushroom, and the show explodes into its most transporting stretch: a psychedelic wander through Beatles-drenched imagery, all lotus blossoms and swirling color, before a hard cut down into a den of grinning, glittering devils who would not look out of place in a Broadway mega-musical's most extravagant nightmare sequence. Every image in this sequence is exactly as I remembered it and somehow hits harder, because Basil Twist's puppetry does not age the way spectacle usually ages. CGI dates instantly; hand-built, breathing, glowing fabric and light do not. Watching it now, in an era saturated with screens, its handmade sorcery feels almost radical.

And then there is Joey Arias herself — ageless is not a figure of speech here, it is a documented fact happening in real time in front of you. The voice remains a one-woman history of American torch singing filtered through camp, drag, and pure vaudeville nerve, sliding from a Billie Holiday-inflected croon into shrieking comic devastation without ever losing the thread. The references have been updated — the topical jabs, the pop-culture jokes, the asides about the current state of the city and the culture — and they land with the same merciless, delighted precision that made the original a word-of-mouth sensation. Arias doesn't perform comedy so much as detonate it, tossing off a one-liner about the present moment and then immediately undercutting it with a growl, a wink, or an obscene gesture that gets the biggest laugh of the night. Nothing here feels like a museum piece reciting old material. It feels like it was written this morning, because in the ways that matter, it was.

Eventually, puppet-Joey rampages through a miniature Manhattan skyline before human-Joey rises up, towering, into the neon of a nightclub finale that pulls out every ounce of stops. It ends, as it must, in a stupendous Busby Berkeley-esque finale — a cascade of shimmer, feathers, and sheer theatrical excess that turns the tiny HERE stage into something that feels, for ten glorious minutes, bigger than any Times Square marquee could contain. I don't think I breathed properly for the last five minutes of it, and I didn't want to.

It's worth remembering just how strange and singular this show was even when it was new. Arias with a Twist became a cult favorite over an eight-month run at HERE in 2008, and it went on to earn Drama Desk and GLAAD Media Award nominations before touring nationally and internationally. Ben Brantley, reviewing that original production for the New York Times, famously told Madonna to eat her heart out, insisting that no arena pop diva had ever staged anything as imaginatively over-the-top as what Twist builds around Arias on a shoestring downtown budget. Watching this revival, I understand exactly what he meant, and I'd go further: what plays here, at close range, in a room where you can feel the puppeteers' effort and craft in your chest, does something no stadium show ever could. It makes the outrageous feel intimate.

What's remarkable about this remount is how little it needed to change and how much it manages to say anyway. The world in 2008 and the world now are not the same place, and a show built entirely from drag, excess, alien invasion, psychedelia, and devilish spectacle turns out to be the perfect vessel for commenting on both eras without ever becoming preachy or dated. It simply holds a rhinestone-covered mirror up to whatever moment it's performed in, and lets Joey Arias do the rest.

Go see this. Bring someone who saw it in 2008 and watch their face. Bring someone who's never heard of it and watch their face. Either way, you will walk out of HERE Arts Center having witnessed something that genuinely does not exist anywhere else in this city — not on Broadway, not off-off, not in cabaret, not in drag, not in puppetry, not anywhere. Twenty years ago I said there was nothing like it. I was right then. I am righter now.