Jade Esteban Estrada is a hoot and a holler as he recalls gay icons ranging

from Isle of Lesbos lyric poet Sappho to TV coming-out luminary Ellen DeGeneres in his one-man musical, "ICONS: The Lesbian & Gay History of the World, Vol. 1."

     This up-and-coming Latin pop singer knows just when and how to get serious, too.

     Late in "ICONS," now at Fielden's Cabaret Theatre under the Richmond Triangle Players banner, Estrada's take on early 20th-century writer and art collector Gertrude Stein resonates with special force today in Stein's insistence that her committed relationship with Alice B. Toklas was a marriage in every sense.

     It also plumbs unexpected depths of the perplexity Stein and Toklas felt as they carved out a life together in Paris at a time when prisoners forced to wear pink triangles were disappearing in Nazi concentration camps.

     Stein and Toklas did not have the benefit of the modern gay-rights movement to guide them.

     "What is the answer, my Alice?" Estrada's Stein sings tenderly and earnestly. "What is the question, my dear?"

     Estrada is no slouch in the vocal department, although most of the songs in "ICONS" are character-driven, at the service of the show's gay-history theme and would have difficulty standing alone outside the context of the show.

     Estrada mentions dozens of gay historical figures as he ranges across three millenniums of gay history.

     But he concentrates, in song and monologue, on only a few.

     Except for Michelangelo, who has a special attachment to his sculpture of David, and Oscar Wilde, who is turned into a strutting, cane-bearing figure suggesting English music halls, Estrada zeros in on the women.

     He changes his attitudes as easily as he switches wigs and articles of clothing, all in full view of the audience, to bring his characters to life.

     The most dynamic - and least well-known - in Estrada's rendering is Sylvia Rivera, the cross-dressing Puerto Rican hustler who threw her shoe at the police raiding New York's gay Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969.

     Her act of defiance is often credited with beginning the gay-rights movement.

     Long before Estrada wraps himself in a rainbow-colored flag at show's end, he's proved he's a master entertainer with a message to convey.

©2004 Richmond Times-Dispatch