Jade Esteban Estrada needs refuge, and he’s found it in the San Antonio

apartment he has rented to store the costumes for his many live shows.

     But his favorite isn’t there.

     Queen Christina, for the time being, is in temporary exile at the dry cleaners.

     “How often can you be a big trailer of a person on stage?” he said by phone last week. “I mean, the dress is like a swimming pool at Liberace’s house.”

     Estrada will put on the gown, the train, crown and the persona of the 17th century Swedish monarch in “ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 2.”

     Queen Chris shares the Nightingale Theater stage Friday and Saturday with Alexander the Great, Susan B. Anthony, Billie Jean King and others in the second of Estrada’s “ICONS” trilogy.

     For the man of too many faces to count, “ICONS 2” gives Estrada a reason to visit Tulsa for the second time in less than three months. He was here with “Tortilla Heaven,” about a multigenerational Mexican-American family bridging cultural gaps.

     “ICONS 2” picks up where he left off in 2005, when he brought Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Ellen DeGeneres, Michelangelo and Sappho to the Nightingale in “ICONS … Vol. 1.”

     The second chapter of his musical look at gays and lesbians who changed the world, however, is a near U-turn from its lighter predecessor, he said.

     “When I did ‘ICONS 1,’ a critic in Columbus (Ohio) said this – he said it in a way that I thought that he wasn’t too crazy about the way I did (it). He called it, like, an ‘Up-with-gay-people kind of show,’ ... I’m like, ‘Yeah, why not?’” Estrada said.

     Estrada is used to splashy production values, fantastic lighting. He is, after all, Charo’s former choreographer and a stand-up comic/actor/singer/ performer featured on such shows as Comedy Central’s “The Graham Norton Effect,” NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” and “In the Life” on PBS.

     “ICONS … Vol. 1,” he said, reflected that glitzy Vegas-side of his showbiz education, but he admitted that the portrayals nearly left him all “gayed out.”

     “ ‘ICONS…Vol. 2’ is called my serious show because there’s a lot of serious issues debated in the show. You’re talking about 9/11, you’re talking about the assassination of Harvey Milk.

     You’re talking about the struggles of Susan B. Anthony,” he said.

     In this show he also portrays Mark Bingham, the United Airlines Flight 93 passenger who called his mother in flight to tell her he loved her and that the passengers were about to fight back against terrorists before they died in a pasture in Pennsylvania.

     He also becomes Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the U.S. Milk was shot in the head at San Francisco City Hall in 1978 by a fellow city supervisor.

     Where the conflicts in the first volume tended to be more personal and deal with gay and lesbian issues, the struggles of the people portrayed in “Icons 2” reach all humanity, he said.

     “ICONS 2” was written by Estrada and directed by David Miguel Estrada. The writer and performer picked up an audience favorite award in solo performance at 2004’s Columbus National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival in Ohio.

     He said he hopes to present the trilogy’s third volume in Tulsa someday to give us a glimpse of his Bessie Smith, Greg Louganis and others, but he’s also already thinking about a fourth chapter.

     There is more gay and lesbian history out there than most people realize, Estrada said.

     “If there is an ‘ICONS … 4,’ and I’ve been thinking about it, just imagine what I’d do,” he said.

 

©2007 Tulsa World