It started with a vintage dress hanging from the ceiling of a Seattle secondhand store. Christopher Kenney was a ballet dancer at the time — 6'3", about 110 pounds, a professional with Pacific Northwest Ballet — and Halloween was coming. All the boys in the company wanted to go out in drag. He wasn't sure about it, but then he spotted it: a long, chiffon 1960s tube dress, pale and elegant, swaying gently above the racks of sequined miniskirts his ballet brothers were already fighting over.
"They all looked like hookers and hoes, and they were hilarious," he recalls, laughing. "I look like a 1960s president's wife. I had a long tube dress with marabou around the ankles, long white gloves, white pearl drop earrings and a bouffant."
That night, heading into Neighbors — Seattle's hottest gay bar — a stranger pushed through the crowd, locked eyes with the impossibly tall vision in vintage chiffon, and said: Are you Edie Sedgwick? Christopher said no. The stranger said: They're all sluts, but you are fabulous.
He had no idea who Edie Sedgwick was. He had to ask a friend. But later that night, when the Halloween drag contest was called and a guy at the sign-in table asked for his name, he remembered. "Don't call me big green thing," he said. "Call me Edie." He entered the contest. He won. And for the rest of his time in that ballet company, the boys called him nothing else.
That was the night Edie was born. And Las Vegas is once again getting her full force.
A Dream That Wouldn't Sit Still
Edie's résumé reads like a love letter to live performance. After Seattle came New York City — Broadway, eight years with a tap company, and an invitation to the legendary Fosse workshop, the exclusive creative incubator behind the development of Fosse the Musical. Then came Cirque du Soleil, and the show that many Las Vegans know her from: Zumanity, the adults-only Cirque production that ran at New York-New York Hotel & Casino for nearly two decades and redefined what a Vegas resident show could be.
But even in the middle of all of it — the costumes, the spectacle, the Cirque machinery humming around her — Edie's mind was somewhere else. "I was daydreaming all the time about a live singing drag show on the strip," she says. "I would go see the shows, and I love lip syncing. It's tradition, it's how we all started. But my brain is always spinning away."
Lip syncing, she explains, has a beautiful democratizing power — it lets anyone, from any background, have a moment of glory on a stage. "Somebody that might have just a day job by day, they can get dolled up at nighttime, get on stage, feel like a celebrity. They can have a moment of excitement and a moment of glory. And that's really wonderful." But Edie knew she had something different to offer, something that would take drag somewhere new. Not better — different. Elevated. Terrifying in the best way.
"I just wanted to take drag to a different level," she says. "Someplace different and scary and exciting."
Faaabulous! Is Born
The result is Faaabulous! — The Ultimate Drag Brunch Show, now in residence at The Venue at Masquerade Village inside Rio Hotel & Casino. Edie co-created the production with longtime collaborator Jamie Morris under their Las Vegas–based entertainment company BevNap Productions, whose portfolio includes Mommie Queerest, Golden Mean Girls, and the globally touring comedy phenomenon Puppetry of the Penis. The show is produced by Ivory Star, the powerhouse team behind Marriage Can Be Murder — also at the Rio — and their infrastructure has been a revelation.
"I turn on my phone and our ads are popping up constantly," Edie says, still marveling at it. "That makes me tingle. When we get there, there is an army of people turning the room over from Marriage Can Be Murder to Faaabulous! — and the second we're done, turning it back. To have that kind of support takes a lot of weight off my shoulders. And there's already a ton of weight on my shoulders."
The show runs 70 minutes and delivers a dense, joyful mix of pop anthems, Broadway favorites, diva tributes, and irreverent parody — with four-part harmonies, duets, and standout solos. Everything performed live. No backing tracks, no pre-recorded vocals, no safety net. It's a distinction that Edie wears like a badge: Faaabulous! is the first all-live-singing drag show in Las Vegas history.
"We are the first show to ever do that in Las Vegas," she says. "That's very exciting."
Meet the Queens
The cast Edie has assembled is as carefully constructed as any Broadway ensemble. Sunshine is a seasoned queen bringing confidence and presence. Leilani, Aria Devine, Martina Brookshire, and Kitty Del Mar round out a lineup of singers — real singers — with the chops to back up every promise the show makes.
"It is very difficult to find singing queens," Edie says. "There's always going to be one or two, but to find a cast of singing queens is very difficult. So I feel very lucky." She pauses, then delivers the detail that stops the room: "I even have one queen who is currently in the Air Force."
The show opens with a number called "Fabulous," written specifically for the production. Ask Edie about it and something lights up in her that no amount of professional polish can contain. "Every single time I hear it, I am just in love with it," she says. "It's like a power-drive song. It just has something."
Las Vegas: A New Kind of Audience – Every Night
Edie has performed in New York, across the country, around the world. She knows the difference between audiences. In New York, she built a congregation — regulars who came to her weekly shows like clockwork, who called her performances "church." In Las Vegas, it's something else entirely.
"Las Vegas is very transient," she says. "It feels like every single time it's like a completely new audience. It's like an ocean wave." That freshness is both the challenge and the gift of performing here. You can't build a regular crowd in the traditional sense, but you also never stop meeting the show's first-ever fans.
Faaabulous! opened its first weekend at the Rio to crowds that surprised even Edie. "I have to say I was a little shocked and pleasantly surprised," she admits. "I was step-dancing happy. I was just like — da da da da da da." She laughs, still riding the high of it. "I don't know if it's going to last, but it's starting off really, really wonderful. So fingers crossed."
She's realistic about the economic headwinds. Vegas is expensive — cocktails, parking, gas, food, all of it adding up fast. And competing for entertainment dollars against RuPaul's Drag Race Live, against television, against the endless Vegas options, is genuinely daunting. "You can't compete against television," she acknowledges. "It's very difficult." But that's also where the live-singing difference becomes a lifeline. You can't stream four-part harmonies in a room that smells like mimosas and glitter. You can't pause it.
What It Means
Drag in 2026 is both more visible and more vulnerable than it's ever been. Shows are shutting down by government order in cities across the country. The cultural battle over drag is loud and, in some places, dangerous. Edie doesn't flinch from it.
"When I was a young queer, it was frightening," she says. "We weren't on TV every day. It was just scary. But it also felt like we were part of a magical world that nobody knew about." She's genuinely happy for the young queer people who exist in a world with far more visibility and far more representation. But she wants them to know something specific when they walk into Faaabulous!
"I want them to know that they have a family they can be a part of. We're going to love them, we're going to hug them, we're going to sit and listen to them and make our community stronger, bigger, happier."
The Invitation
Every ticket to Faaabulous! comes with bottomless mimosas (excludes "show only" ticket) and includes a meet-and-greet with the queens — a deliberate, structural commitment to exactly that kind of connection. The show runs every Saturday and Sunday at The Venue at Masquerade Village. When asked for a final message to anyone still on the fence, Edie doesn't overthink it.
"Come," she says. "Have the time of your life. Listen to these girls sing. Their voices are outrageous. They are audacious, they are ambitious, and they are fabulous."