Lypsinka has been a New York icon for almost 30 years. And she’s never uttered a single word.
Not that the flamboyant, highly theatrical redhead has nothing to say. It’s just that she only expresses herself through lip-syncing songs, excerpts from vintage Hollywood movies and spoken bits from obscure concert recordings.
Now Lypsinka is back in the East Village, where she got her start, with a reprise of 2001’s “The Boxed Set,” which mixes hilarious monologues and zany tunes by classic dames, such as Bette Davis and Ethel Merman, Natalie Wood and Phyllis Diller.
“I don’t think it’s important to know the references,” says
John Epperson, Lypsinka’s mild-mannered, dry-witted creator, about his drag character. “It may add a little extra punch if you do, but the show is still visually and aurally funny if you don’t.”
Epperson is performing “The Boxed Set” in rep with the equally demented “The Passion of the Crawford” (re-creating a Joan Crawford interview) and the autobiographical “Show Trash,” in which he appears as himself.
The performer, now 59, grew up lip-syncing to records with his two siblings in their hometown of Hazlehurst, Miss.: “Our mother called it pantomime,” Epperson recalls. He turned that hobby into an artistic outlet after he moved to New York in 1978 and started appearing at East Village venues like Club 57 and the Pyramid Club.
In addition, Epperson, who’d been playing the piano since he was a kid, had started accompanying singers and dancers in college so he could make pocket money “to buy Bette Midler records and After Dark magazines,” he says, with a chuckle. This training proved helpful in New York: In 1980 he landed a day job as a rehearsal pianist at American Ballet Theatre.
Epperson’s association with ABT continued through the years — he even appeared in the movie “Black Swan,” billed as Jaded Piano Player on IMDb.
ABT also helped open his horizons, most notably with a 1981 tour trip to Europe. At the end of the tour, he hit Paris and found a club called Chez Michou. “The waiters take your order, and 30 minutes later they’re onstage as Liza Minnelli or Edith Piaf,” says Epperson. “They were lip-syncing better than I had seen it before, and I wondered if I could do the same thing.”
Lypsinka got her breakthrough in 1988, when she was booked to do a late-night show following performances of Charles Busch’s off-Broadway hit “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” But Epperson continued to work on non-Lypsinka projects, too, penning the 2006 off-Broadway comedy “My Deah” and playing the wicked Stepmother in a City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” in 2004.
“One of the reasons I’m doing ‘Show Trash’ is so people see I can do something else than lip-syncing,” Epperson says a little wistfully. “Drag is a trap, and inside that trap is another trap called lip-syncing.”
Maybe, but when it’s the expert Lypsinka who’s laying it, this is a trap you won’t want to escape.