Will BenDeLaCreme Find Love in ‘Ready to Be Committed?’

Sweet as pie and sharp as cheddar, RuPaul’s Drag Race superstar BenDeLaCreme is currently embarking on her biggest solo tour yet as star and lead producer.

After two long years of postponements, the global icon finally launched Ready to Be Committed, her highly acclaimed, one-woman cabaret that blends burlesque, comedy, and original music with her signature “terminally delightful” charm. Will we see DeLa overcome the pitfalls of love, marriage, and romance in a limited engagement about the limitations of engagements? There’s only one way to find out.

Written, directed, and produced by DeLa herself, Ready to Be Committed showcases DeLa’s talents at her best, and the show played to sold-out crowds in New York City and Provincetown upon its debut in 2019.

The tour will stop at Denver’s Summit on May 18, and OFM caught up with DeLa to talk more about it.

I cannot imagine how excited you must be to finally tour Ready to Be Committed. How does it feel to get this show on the road?

Oh my God, it’s such a relief! I premiered this show in New York in 2019, and then I did a run in Provincetown. Spring 2020 was when we were supposed to do our international tour. When the pandemic started, we were sort of like, “Oh, everything will be cleared up in a month or so. We can still do it. OK, we’ll postpone the first half of the tour. OK, we’ll postpone the whole tour, but just a couple months.” Now here we are, and I am so happy to finally be able to share this show with people.

Did you make any major changes to the show, or is it the same as the original iteration?

This has obviously given me a lot of time to up the ante on production value in terms of doing bigger, better costumes and theatrics, but the material itself, it’s interesting because you revisit some stuff after we’ve all gone through all these global crises, and you’re like, “Oh, man, this is a different world. It doesn’t hold up.” However, this show is all about love, relationships, and our social ideas and stories about that. Those are topics that people have been exploring since the early days of storytelling.

It was cool to revisit it and feel like, “OK, this still really works.” If anything, I think the pandemic really made these topics of connection, or lack of connection, even more pertinent and immediate. We’ve all had to confront what it is to be alone, to maybe be stuck in small quarters with someone else, to be apart, so I think all these feelings are pretty stirred up in a lot of people now. I’m excited to get to explore them.

What initially inspired you to create a show centered on weddings, settling down, and love, and what do you ultimately hope that audiences take away from it?

All my shows are kind of sprung from personal experiences, and I’ve been with my partner at this point for seven years, and we’ve been kind of building this life together. We work together, we suffered the pandemic together, and it’s by the far the longest I’ve ever been with somebody. This level of commitment and life building really got me thinking about all these topics, but whenever I write stuff like this, it starts from a personal place.

Then I made a point to really expand it and think about all the different ways that people might be coming into this show. There will be people in the audience who are single and happy about it, single and unhappy about it, in a relationship and happy about it, and in a relationship and unhappy about it. I wanted to talk to all of them, so it’s really about the stories and messages that we receive over the course of our lives about what a relationship must be, what commitment has to look like, and the value of being in a relationship versus not being in a relationship.

I’m trying to pull that apart and kind of shed some of the pressure of what we’ve been told. Remember, this is our journey. We’re all on our own journey, and we get to do what we want with it. We get to connect to people in any way that we want to or not want to.

Are you and Gus married?

We’re not married. It’s something that we’ve talked about so much, but in the end, it’s something that we’re not sure that we want or not. We just know that we’re building this life together, and for now, it’s not really something we need.

Without giving too much away, is there a part of the show that is your absolute favorite?

Oh, gosh. This show is so much fun, and there’s so much crammed into it, and I’m very proud of the weird stuff that I came up with to tell this story. I don’t know if I can nail down one specific favorite part. I do very much enjoy that it’s full of original music, and along DeLa’s path, she meets Cupid, and they start to talk about what love really is. Then they do a rap together about all the different historical ways that love has been defined, from medieval times when it was like an imbalance in the humors, to Freud when it’s repressed sex to periods of time when it was considered a mental disorder. That’s one of my favorite ones because it’s a goofy, irreverent way to really talk about a lot of heavy intellectual material, and that’s kind of my favorite line to ride.

This is your biggest solo tour yet as star and lead producer. How meaningful is that to you?

It’s amazing, and it’s mind blowing to be able to do all this for ourselves. BenDeLaCreme Presents is a very small team. It’s queer-run by and for the queer community, and it feels very liberating to be an artist who really gets to be in charge of every aspect of what I’m bringing into the world. It’s a huge sense of accomplishment. We started this production company in an official capacity in 2018, and it’s grown exponentially so quickly. It’s kind of mind boggling.

You first got back on the road last year with the The Return of The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show, LIVE!. How did it feel to perform in front of live audiences again?

I knew throughout the pandemic how much I missed it, and I knew how happy I was going to be to do it again, but I was not prepared for the level of joy that it brought me. It really was an amazing reminder that, for me, this really does feel like a life’s purpose, and I feel very grateful to have something that feels like a life’s purpose. When that was taken away for a couple years, the level of depression and loss was so staggering, but you get used to it after 24 months. Then getting back in front of people was like, “Oh, right, this is what I’m on this Earth for,” and it was just amazing.

Any developments about this year’s holiday show you would like to share with us?

There are no announcements yet. It’s still early in the year, which means we’re already deep into planning (laughs). Rest assured, Jinkx and I will be back on the road, and it will be as it has been in past years, only bigger and better than ever. We’re continuing to grow, so people can expect to see us back and to be just as delighted and swaddled in our reverent holiday spirit as ever.

Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention or plug?

These are the big ones. There are other things on the burner, but 2022 is going to be all about these two big tours and making up for lost time!

Stay up-to-date and connect with DeLa by following her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok @bendelacreme, or visit her official website. Click here to purchase tickets for her May 18 performance at Denver’s Summit.

Photos courtesy of Eric Paguio and Magnus Hastings