Caluzzi Cabaret: A look inside Auckland's iconic drag queen dinner show
Friday, 29 April 2022
Since 1996 the queens of Caluzzi have entertained audiences on Auckland’s Karangahape Rd. Melanie Earley explores how a simple cafe became an iconic cabaret show full of laughter and risqué humour.
The nightlife on Auckland’s Karangahape Rd, commonly known as K Rd, has always been a grungy yet colourful scene; filled with gay clubs, pubs, karaoke bars and cabaret-style restaurants.
Sitting beside The Thirsty Dog and Lifewise’s not-for-profit Merge Cafe, is Caluzzi Cabaret. Described as “drag queen dinner theatre”, the pink and black building has been providing food and jubilant energy to the community for over 25 years.
Inside the doors is an intimate club, which seats around 60 guests at a time. On a Friday or Saturday night you can expect most seats to be filled - it’s a chance for punters to temporarily forget their troubles.
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Nick Kennedy-Hall, also known by his drag name, Anita Wigl’it, is one half of the duo that has owned Caluzzi Cabaret for the past five years.
Kennedy-Hall and his best friend, Nick Nash, also known as Kita Mean, who recently won RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under, see themselves as “the caretakers” of Caluzzi Cabaret rather than the owners.
The format of the shows has been the same since the beginning in 1996, Kennedy-Hall explains: “We’ve just redecorated and zhuzhed it up a little bit”.
The pair had been close friends since meeting at K Rd’s Family Bar when they were both first starting out as drag queens.
“Kita was so nice, and we got on so well and became friends,” Kennedy-Hall says. “We started Kita and Anita’s Drag Wars together, and it just went from there.'
The pair also hosted and produced the TV show House of Drag that ran for two seasons from 2018 on TVNZ OnDemand.
Caluzzi started life as a cafe that did catering– there were two drag queens working there at the time, a chef known as Felicia Porget and a server known by the name of Courtney Cartier.
As Kennedy-Hall puts it, the duo were the “original Caluzzi girls”, who would often go upstairs to get changed into drag after their shifts and head down all dressed up and ready for a night out on the town.
The regular customers loved seeing them dressed up, and asked if they could put on a drag show. Soon enough, the cafe closed down, and was transformed into a full-time drag cabaret venue.
A painting of Courtney Cartier still hangs in her honour on the walls of Caluzzi Cabaret – she died in October 2000 at the age of 32 in Auckland’s Herne Bay House, a hospice for people with HIV, from lymphatic cancer after living with HIV for a number of years.
Kennedy-Hall and Nash are the fourth set of owners at Caluzzi Cabaret. They bought it off a man named Campbell Orr who had been the owner for around 12 years and overseen its transformation from the earlier days.
Orr says Caluzzi had been running as a cabaret venue for around three years before he took over the reins.
“Courtney and Felicia were the starters, I came on as a temporary bar manager, who was asked to stay on.
“I went travelling overseas for a while, but whenever I came back home I’d go in and work there. One day the owner at the time, Paul Oatham, let me know he’d had enough of working nights and was leaving, so I bought it.”
Orr had known Courtney Cartier, but says by the time he owned Caluzzi Cabaret she was already very sick.
“I do remember back before I knew anything about Caluzzi I worked at another bar on K Rd and Courtney and the other drag queens would come in. It was the first time I’d ever seen drag queens.”
Orr remembers Caluzzi Cabaret as an “amazing place” and says he had so much fun there over the years.
“The old days were good, and the original girls were amazing. Over the years I feel like the audience became more conservative really, at the start it was quite niche.
“This was a time when there was no marriage equality and homosexuality had only been legalised for a few years, so the community would come here and feel safe.
“You’d have a corporate group on one side, drag queens in the middle and then the gay community coming in for drinks too.”
During his time working and then owning Caluzzi, Orr says a lot of personal life moments happened for him there.
“There was a lot of joy there, a lot of growing up for me and figuring out who I was.”
Orr’s favourite memories of Caluzzi however, were from when the last of the punters headed out the door and the staff would all have a drink and enjoy each other’s company.
“It was an incredibly hard decision for me to leave, it’s such a unique business, but it was just time, and Kita and Anita taking it on was the perfect decision.”
Before buying Caluzzi, Nash had been performing at Kita Mean there for a number of years, Orr mentioned he would be selling up and Nash called Kennedy-Hall and suggested they buy it together.
There’s a standard format to a Caluzzi show, Kennedy-Hall says: they have a rotating cast of about 12 drag queens, who perform around the venue while also serving as waitresses to the guests.
The drag queens who perform there regularly are Kola Gin, Miss Geena, Ling Ling, Crystal Quartz, Ivanna Dr’nk, Miss Trinity Ice and Vanessa LaRoux, and punters are provided with a three-course meal along with a drag performance.
Orr says the formula for Caluzzi Cabaret has always been simple – there’s an official start time when people need to be seated to order their food and drinks.
“The waitresses are the drag queens and I think this helps the audience get to know them better and feel more at ease.”
After the meals and drinks are ordered, the show begins, and party games are played. As Orr remembers it, the night would always finish with a group number.
Drag brunches have proved a popular newer addition to Caluzzi Cabaret, involving 2 and a half hours of bottomless mimosas.
Ivanna Dr’nk has been working at Caluzzi for almost five years, and says it’s a pillar of the drag queen community.
“Every drag queen wants to work there and be a Caluzzi girl, I remember always wanting to be one, and it was a place where I could make drag a career.”
Ivanna Dr’nk believes the show Ru Paul’s Drag Race really helped opportunities for drag queens take off across the world.
“I get to do all kinds of things, it’s really busy. I think there’s more and more full-time drag queens out there now.”
Kennedy-Hall said it used to be about 99% straight people who were coming into Caluzzi, but recently they were seeing a lot more diversity.
“I think people would often come along to see what the gays are up to.”
Ivanna Dr’nk says nowadays a lot of the work they do at Caluzzi is for hen’s parties, and the girls refer to January through April as “hens’ season”.
Around November/December it’s corporate groups coming in for work Christmas parties.
“We also get a lot of people coming in for their birthdays or when they just want to celebrate life.
“Last weekend we had a woman celebrating turning 85 come in, and she said going to Caluzzi had been on her bucket list.
“Most of our guests are straight women between their 30s and 60s, I think it's just a fun night out for them, and it’s funny because it’s men dressed as women. It feels like a safe environment for them here.”
One reason why the show attracts women more than men may be down to women generally being more open with the drag community, Ivanna Dr’nk says.
“In saying that, we have seen more men coming in lately. Often you’ll see a guy coming in who is maybe more reserved or nervous about being there, but by the end of the night they’re loving it.”
A typical Friday or Saturday night for Ivanna Dr’nk starts with getting ready for work around 4.30 or 5pm. By 6.30pm she’s at Caluzzi ready for the doors to open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7.30pm.
K Rd itself has also evolved since the earlier days of Caluzzi, but Kennedy-Hall believes it still retains some of those “grungy” areas.
“There’s still prostitutes on the corner and drag queens and gay bars all around,” he says.
Six, who owns community newpasper K Rd Chronicle, has spent many years living on K Rd and says Caluzzi is a great cabaret performance on the street.
“It’s really clever, and it’s been raised to a whole ‘nother level recently. Back in the day I can remember yelling at them to stop performing Abba songs, but it’s so much more than lip-syncing to Abba.”
When Six was homeless, she would often sleep outside Merge Cafe, and says when the Caluzzi girls would finish their shows for the night they’d regularly come out and give her food.
“This was good, wholesome, quality food too,” Six says. “K Rd itself is such a community, and people there will help you out if you need it.”
Six would like to see K Rd stay a place where people come for grunge and community.
“In recent years there have been those Ponsonby people creeping in, but I think people could use K Rd as a role model on how to include everyone in society as it’s so diverse.”
Caluzzi Cabaret allows guests to forget about their everyday troubles and stresses, Kennedy-Hall says.
“People come here and they tell us at the end of the show that for the last few hours they were able to forget all about their troubles in life – to provide that little window of joy for people is so special.”
Orr says Caluzzi Cabaret has always held a huge importance to the community in Auckland.
“We have never treated it as though we are trying to change the world, we just wanted to have fun.
“I think the people of Caluzzi, the queens, are the best part of it. They’re the ones who make it what it is.”