The lives of a devoted gay couple who run a vibrant drag nightclub are thrown into chaos when their son returns home to announce his impending marriage to the daughter of an ultra-conservative, anti-gay politician.

I think there’s a lot of potential to reimagine this show for 2026 in a really special, humanizing way by taking it seriously how awful it is to ask Zaza to not be there when the son she raised for 24 years is engaged. I know, I know - this is being pretty precious about a screwball sitcom plot. But to frame her humiliation in a glamorous celebration of illusory gender expression (“…what we are is an illusion / We love how it feels putting on heels causing confusion”) is to trivialize it, and it would be refreshingly audacious to ask, hey, why exactly are we playing this for laughs?

I don’t think you even need to meaningfully change the details of how the story resolves. Adjust the tone of the family scenes. Give it room to breathe with some melancholic moments. The reality of being in an older relationship (with your boss!) in the ‘70s/‘80s would weigh heavily against an act of total invalidation; it’s so common for older women to stay in relationships that don’t serve them out of practical, loving, fearful inertia. There’s a sneaky amount to say about the universal quality of womanhood that’s masked here by unrelenting camp.

You would embrace the datedness by letting it function as a period piece. Many of yesteryear’s drag queens are today’s assimilated trans women, who just happen to have the benefit of better-established medical, legal, and social pathways to culturally acceptable self-expression. (Many in the latter camp, by the way, have nevertheless suffered the experience of being asked to hide themselves at family gatherings.) Cast Jinkx Monsoon, who rose to prominence as a gay male drag artist then pivoted into mainstream theater roles as a trans woman, and she can win a Tony.

Let Zaza be a performer by trade but not necessarily in substance:

• She always calls herself Zaza, even when her loved ones do not
• She should dress herself and apply her own makeup in an on-stage dressing room with vanity mirror
• Flip a standard or two to an ironic minor key
• If you want you can go for broke reprising “I Am What I Am” as an 11 o’clock number and cutting Dindon’s comeuppance entirely