Charles Busch

Charles Louis Busch, born August 23, 1954, in New York City, is an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and drag performer. He grew up in Hartsdale, New York, after being raised initially by his parents — his father Benjamin, a record store owner who had aspired to be an opera singer, and his mother Gertrude, who died when Busch was seven. Following his mother's death, his maternal aunt, Lillian Blum, a former teacher, brought him to live in Manhattan. He has two older sisters: Meg, a former producer of promotional spots for Showtime, and Betsy, a textile designer. From an early age, Busch developed a strong interest in films, particularly those featuring female leads from the 1930s and 1940s.

Busch attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan before enrolling at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he majored in drama and earned his B.A. in 1976. During his time at Northwestern, difficulty securing roles in university productions led him to begin writing his own material, which drew considerable campus interest. He toured the country from 1978 to 1984 in a non-drag one-man show he wrote titled Alone With a Cast of Thousands. By 1984, performance bookings had grown scarce, and he supported himself through a range of jobs including temporary office work, apartment cleaning, portrait work at bar mitzvahs, phone sales, shop management, ice cream service, sports handicapping, and artists' modeling.

A piece he initially conceived as a short skit for the Limbo Lounge, a performance space and gallery in Manhattan's East Village, became Vampire Lesbians of Sodom in 1984. That production launched a series of shows created with collaborators under the banner Theatre in Limbo, which built a loyal gay following. Subsequent works included Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium (1984), Times Square Angel (1985, Provincetown Playhouse), Pardon My Inquisition, or Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets (1986) — in which Busch played both a prostitute named Maria Garbanza and her look-alike, the Marquesa del Drago — Psycho Beach Party (July 1987 to May 1988), The Lady in Question (July to December 1989, Orpheum Theatre), and Red Scare on Sunset (June to September 1991, Lortel Theatre). In these productions, Busch typically performed the leading female role in drag. He has described the practice as liberating rather than primarily political, calling it an aesthetic choice that expanded his expressive range.

In 1988, Busch rewrote the book for the musical Ankles Aweigh for a production staged by the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut. His Charles Busch Revue was produced at the Ballroom Theatre in New York in May 1993, the same year he performed the role of Solange in a revival of Jean Genet's The Maids at the Off-Broadway Classic Stage Company. Also in 1993, he published a novel, Whores of Lost Atlantis, a fictionalized account of the creation of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. He took the male lead in You Should Be So Lucky, which opened at Primary Stages Company in November 1994. Other works from the decade include Swingtime Canteen (Blue Angel, New York City, August 1995), the one-man show Flipping My Wig (WPA Theater, December 1996), Queen Amarantha (WPA Theatre, October 1997), and The Green Heart, a musical Busch adapted from a short story by Jack Ritchie, produced by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Variety Arts Theatre in April 1997. His play Die, Mommie, Die! had its first performance in Los Angeles in July 1999 at the Coast Playhouse.

Busch's Broadway career encompasses work as both a performer and a writer. The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, his best-known play, opened on Broadway in October 2000 following an Off-Broadway run earlier that year. Written for actress Linda Lavin, who performed opposite Michele Lee and Tony Roberts, it was the first of his plays in which Busch did not appear and the first he created for a mainstream audience. The production ran for 777 performances, received a Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play nomination in 2000, and earned a Tony Award Best Play nomination in 2001. His other Broadway credit as a book writer is Taboo, the autobiographical musical by Boy George. Busch also appeared on Broadway in 2009, and the compilation Chance & Chemistry documents his Broadway-related work.

His film work includes appearances in Trouble on the Corner (1997), as well as screen adaptations of two of his own plays: Die, Mommie, Die! (1999) and Psycho Beach Party (2000). He co-wrote, directed, and starred in A Very Serious Person (2006), which featured Polly Bergen and received an honorable mention at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 2021, he co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in The Sixth Reel. On television, Busch held a recurring role in the HBO series Oz from 1999 to 2000, playing Nat Ginzburg across the third and fourth seasons. In 2001, he guest starred on the soap opera One Life to Live as Peg Barlow, a woman who owns a modeling agency, with no reference made within the show to the fact that a male actor was playing the role. Earlier in his career, he wrote television sitcom pilots as supplemental income, selling three pilots to CBS that were not produced.

Among his notable stage work after 2000, Busch headlined a revival of his 1999 play Shanghai Moon in January 2003 at the Drama Dept, Greenwich House Theatre, co-starring BD Wong. He has performed the eponymous lead in three productions of Auntie Mame: a staged reading in 1998, a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in 2003, and a small-scale summer touring production in 2004. Our Leading Lady, his play about actress Laura Keene, was produced by the Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage II in 2007, starring Kate Mulgrew. The Third Story premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in September 2008 and was subsequently produced in New York by MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, where it opened in February 2009 with Busch and Kathleen Turner in the cast. The Divine Sister, a satirical work drawing on Hollywood films about religion, ran at the SoHo Playhouse beginning in September 2010. In 2013, Busch wrote and starred as Jimmy in the Primary Stages production of The Tribute Artist. In March 2019, he starred as Lucille Ball in Lee Tannen's I Loved Lucy at the Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, New York. Since 2000, he has performed an annual one-night staged reading of his 1984 Christmas play Times Square Angel. A native of New York City, Busch has worked across stage, screen, and television for more than four decades.