The joke that nearly broke Reuben Kaye was meant to be the safer, softer, conservative option. The drag artist, comedian and cabaret star waltzed onto the set of Network 10’s The Project more than three years ago, dressed to the nines, wearing his warpaint, armed with his zingers and ready for his close-up. Live television is rarely truly live and unscripted, however, meaning Kaye had been provided with his big set-up question from the panel – How do people react to you? – well in advance.
Kaye is queer, and cutting, and so was his first draft reply: “How do people react to me? People have called me genre-bending, gender-bending, the boy next door – oops, sorry, that’s George Pell’s shopping list.” So far, so provocative. His second option? “Well, I get a bit of flak online. It all tends to come from the religious right, who say, ‘You have to accept Jesus or else you’ll burn in hell.’ And to them I say, ‘That’s ridiculous, I love any man who can get nailed for three days and come back for more.’ ”
Boom-tish. Structurally solid gag. Albeit well-worn territory. Almost a (dirty) dad joke, in the same blasphemous ballpark as some of Jimmy Carr’s stand-up, or a South Park episode. A producer thought it prudent to avoid Pell (who had died just one month prior) – better to do the Jesus one instead.
“So I went on, did it, everyone’s laughing, we shake hands, job done,” says Kaye, snacking on a Malteser. “Then I go back to the Airbnb I’ve got for the night on tour, and I can see this counter of clips on TikTok and Instagram going up and up and up. And up.”
A digital holy army had mobilised, immediately rallying an offensive against Kaye. He was meant to be doing a morning TV spot the next day, for example, but got a call at 4.30am, pulling him from the segment with little explanation. Little was needed either, given the torrent of hate already spewing forth. The next night, The Project waved the white flag, too, apologising to viewers. “If they had said, ‘We understand that this joke offended a bunch of people, but we stand by Reuben’s right to make that joke,’ that would have had more integrity, and been more interesting. And it would have given them more kudos at a time when they could have used it,” says Kaye, eyebrows raised with devilish schadenfreude – a clear nod to the fate of the since-cancelled TV show. Grinning, he adds: “Only one of us is still here.”
Instead, they played it safe, leaving Kaye feeling the opposite and facing a deluge of death threats. “I can’t express what the pile-on was like,” he says now. “It was just constantly ‘Kill yourself. Die, faggot. We’re coming for you. Watch yourself at your next gig. We know where you’re performing. We know where you live. We’re going to set your face on fire.’ ”
His talent agency was bombarded, one man smashing through their front doors, demanding an apology. Others marched in black at his shows, carrying crucifixes and chanting the Lord’s Prayer. Gigs and galas were cancelled. Metal detectors were recommended at venues, and private security was hired. His family was put on a priority response list with police, prompting conversations with relatives, urging them not to open any packages addressed to him. “Their world had suddenly become scary, because of a joke,” Kaye says. “That really broke my heart.”
The die-down was gradual, but for many, many months his phone felt like it was emitting a constant hum of electric malevolence, evidence of what many of his queer performing peers now routinely note – that intolerance is rising, that who tells a joke matters more than the joke itself, and that it is now easier than ever before to whip people into a frenzied fervour.
“That’s the scary thing and the relevant thing today. That’s what my experience has taught me, because if your faith is really solid, a joke isn’t going to shake it. And there’s so many other things to watch, so much content, so much other art. There are so many other avenues for your attention in this world,” says Kaye, 42, shaking his head. “I really shouldn’t be your problem.”
Tonight, he’s no problem at all. Tonight, Kaye is marvellous company. We’re in a basement space in London, far below the West End, waiting to take in a show together. It’s a special hospitality suite but, as Kaye points out, when you’re in the UK it doesn’t matter how fancy the setting, there’s always that faint smell of damp when you enter a room. “We’re still very much in a Dickensian framework,” he says, smiling, “with set dressing.”
We’re here to see Moulin Rouge! The Musical, not just because the Baz Luhrmann film was one of his core cinematic obsessions, but because Kaye – who cut his performing teeth here – has just been cast as one of the leads in a new production of the show coming to the Sydney Lyric Theatre in March. He’s on a high right now, and could not seem further away from his post-joke nadir.
Next year, on the big stage back home, the Melbourne performer will be playing Harold Zidler, the owner of the titular Belle Époche Parisian club – a role that fills him with enthusiasm “but also panic, because it’s so big. It’s momentous. The sheer scale of the show is outrageous,” Kaye says. “But Zidler gets some amazing things to do. He’s got so much light and shade. He’s compromised, right? He hasn’t got time for innocent love. There’s a cynic in him, and that suits me 100 per cent. He gets comedy. He gets sex. He gets menace. It makes me think, ‘I’m glad I’ve got six months to rehearse,’ because there’s a lot of detail in that.”
The theatre chimes ring. Good evening and welcome to the Piccadilly Theatre. Would you kindly take your seats as this evening’s performance of Moulin Rouge will commence in three minutes.
And with that, Kaye takes his mint ice cream, his gin and soda, and that box of Maltesers, and we wander into the world he’s about to inhabit. He’s engrossed from the start, too, tenting his fingers and nodding, or murmuring an emphatic “Yes” under his breath. He looks up from our seats at the gargantuan set – glittering, gritty and ever so glamorous – and whispers, “Doesn’t it just make you wish you were alive during the time of syphilis?”
The time of COVID was the last time Moulin Rouge! The Musical opened in Australia. That 2021 run ended in 2024, when theatre availability became scarce, but Carmen Pavlovic, the CEO of production company Global Creatures, always felt they left demand on the table. Zidler is pivotal to the show, she adds, embodying the entire story: art and love versus commerce and survival. British actor Jim Broadbent played Zidler in the movie, of course, but it’s a role somewhat open to interpretation, played on stage by everyone from Boy George to Megan Thee Stallion. “The book remains the book,” says Pavlovic, “so it’s really about how Reuben engages the audience – how he connects. Zidler makes morally questionable choices, and the audience needs to stay on his side as he does so.”
They cast the net wide before settling on Kaye, aware of his showmanship, vibrancy and danger; his singing range and fondness for direct address. The only thing casting director Lisa Campbell didn’t know was whether he was dexterous enough to show heart. Basically, until his audition, she didn’t know if he could act. “But that’s what surprised me most: the delicacy and the vulnerability he was able to access,” she says. “Afterwards, we all sat back shell-shocked by what we had seen.”
They might not have been shocked, of course, had they known Kaye’s history. Yes, this is that part of the longform profile piece where we get to the obligatory origin story, but I promise you, it’s unlike any personal creation myth you’ve heard.
There’s the tale of his paternal grandmother Roza, for example – a huge, ebullient woman who described herself as a “witch” in Stalinist Russia and married her husband in a labour camp, then gave birth to Reuben’s dad Lazar (a painter and sculptor who passed away in 2016), before living out a migrant nanna’s dream life in leafy Kew, spoiling her grandson with Choc Wedges and Yogo.
No, that’s insufficiently wild. Let’s unspool the thread of his maternal heritage instead, through Kaye’s grandmother Elfriede and grandfather Heinrich.
Elfriede and Heinrich came to Australia separately, as Jewish German refugees, and met in Tatura, in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley. Then, due to their staunch communist beliefs, they defected back into East Berlin. Reuben’s mum Karin was born en route – in London in 1946 – then grew up in East Germany singing The Internationale alongside her brother Helmut.
Five years later, Elfriede decided to escape the domineering Heinrich, who had ascended the ranks within the Stasi – but fleeing was dangerous, and meant she could take only one child. Elfriede made her own “Sophie’s Choice” and took Karin, Reuben’s mum, leaving behind poor Helmut, his uncle, who the embittered Heinrich promptly threw into an orphanage. Helmut ultimately became a banjo player and a clown, but a tragically sad figure, too, who died during a bank robbery. “He was the getaway driver,” says Kaye, eating a custard pastry days later, in Soho. “He pulled into a dead-end street and realised there was no way out. And he shot himself.”
Still with me? Next, the independent Elfriede set up shop in Melbourne, running an atelier in Collins Street, but she was a deeply traumatised woman, suffering volatile periods of mania and depression. Elfriede died by suicide when Karin was 18, after which Reuben’s mum spent time in foster care. As a young woman she gave acting a go – even appearing in the 1970 Ned Kelly movie starring Mick Jagger – but ultimately became a documentary filmmaker. When pregnant with Reuben in 1984, her water broke in the back seat of a taxi, then in the hospital she gave birth to Reuben Raoul Krum in the shortest labour possible. “He came out punching,” says Karin. “Damn near hit the wall on the other side of the room.”
Like I said, not your average family tree.
This bouncing baby boy in a hurry was named “Reuben” after both the doctor who delivered him and his godfather, Ben. “Raoul”, his middle name, was for Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in the Holocaust, while “Krum” comes from the German word for bent. “You can’t make this shit up,” says Kaye (his stage name, after childhood favourite performer Danny Kaye). “Also, ‘Reuben’ is old Hebrew for ‘Behold, my son,’ which kind of translates to ‘Look at my son, the poof,’ which I think is charming.”
Karin’s rules for parenting Reuben and his older brother Samuel were simple: “I had no appropriate role models for parenting in my life,” she says, “so I thought, ‘I will teach my sons three things: how to cook, how to dance and how to tell jokes, and with those three skills they should be able to make their way in the world.’ ”
She probably enacted that final rule too soon. Reuben was raised on a diet of The Goon Show and Jackie Mason but got his first big laugh much earlier, when he was just four. His mum stood him on a tabletop at a cocktail party, then whispered the following joke for him to recite: Why do they call it a pap smear? Because if they called it a c--- scrape, no one would go.
“The joke killed,” he says. “It did not do so well at show-and-tell the next day.”
He had a happy childhood at home, but a deeply unhappy one at school. Performing Groucho Marx routines and West Side Story numbers on the playground didn’t exactly endear him to classmates. “I was being called a faggot before I knew what a faggot was,” he says. “From the minute I landed in school.”
One time, he returned from recess, opened his pencil case and found it filled with saliva. The class had passed it around, giving everyone a chance to spit inside.
Kaye points to a scar above his left eye, from when he ended up in hospital after being chased through the yard, kids throwing stones at him. “I fell and split my head open, and I stood up and this fountain of blood just poured out.”
He’s 6 foot 2 (188 centimetres) and 83 kilograms now, but back then, he was short and slender, and one kid used to grab him by the backpack at the bus stop, then hoist him out into open traffic, before pulling him back. “Into the way of cars, out of the way of cars,” he says, “again and again.”
His bestie in high school, Bron Ryrie Jones, remembers meeting Reuben when he was 12. “He was already absolutely himself,” says Jones. “He either didn’t know or didn’t care that 95 per cent of the references he was using – Cher, Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler – were not on the same planet, culturally, as anyone else.”
The bullying she saw was unrelenting but also an opportunity for him to flex a formidable intellect and comic chops – the same weapons he now wields professionally. “His words were his shield, his armour and his defence, and so it was years of honing his craft and disallowing people to use words to steer him off course,” Jones says. “I met him the day after The Project, and it wasn’t dissimilar to meeting him at the locker bay after copping it again from these horrendous schoolboys: yes it was awful, but you also just felt like if it’s words we’re battling with, Reuben would come out on top.”
His mum spots a parallel between those episodes, too, yet perhaps in the trauma more than triumph. Watching her son suffer on both occasions was, she says, agony. “Absolute agony. There is a wonderful phrase by which I live: no parent can be happier than their unhappiest child,” she says. “It was the same after The Project – they chucked him to the wolves and the wolves went for him. I was utterly terrified, and astonished by the courage with which he faced it. I thought they were going to kill him.”
Kaye sees it all, too. Someone hurls a rock at him, he hurls one back. Someone lights a match, he pours the petrol. “All I ever got told was, ‘You just like the attention, whether it’s good or bad – can’t you just tone your behaviour down?’ ” he recalls. “And that sets up two voices in your head – one saying, ‘You’re not worth anything being you,’ and the other one saying, ’F--- ’em.’ Those are the two devils on my shoulder my entire life.”
The shining light in this dark chapter, of course, was music. Kaye was first captivated by the stage in primary school, on a class excursion to see The Phantom of the Opera. “I was like, that’s magic,” he says. “That’s a show.” From there he saw Chicago and visited spiegeltents and experimental theatre, but his love for live performance all dates back to that crucible excursion, which is why he sees something like Moulin Rouge! The Musical less as a huge commercial enterprise than as an access point for laypeople.
He gives his best performances, he adds, whenever students are in the house. “School groups can be badly behaved, or a struggle, but it’s mostly the first time they’ve been in a theatre, and of course there’s going to be one kid there like me, who doesn’t fit in with anyone else, and I want them to know that there’s a world out there for them: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Come here.’ ”
Bullied teenagers often have validating happy-ending tales about how the world opened up once they left school. How none of those years mattered in the end. How they found their people. But others can’t escape their past.
Kaye went to Swinburne University, and then the Victorian College of the Arts, creative hotbeds where you might assume he would fit in, but he just didn’t function in groups or the school environment, scarred as he was by both. “I was in my head for a lot of it, in the classroom wondering: ‘Does anyone here like you?’ I carried that me-against-the-world mentality.”
After doing weird little shows and countless auditions without success, he saved for a year and flew – maybe fled – to London in 2010, where he did musicals, panto and cabaret. The fit was tongue-in-groove. His first night performing there was at a place called Cellar Door, which was an old pissoir – a public bathroom Oscar Wilde was said to frequent, which is now a performance lounge underneath The Lyceum, where The Lion King is staged. “Which is so funny,” he says. “All these families and kids are on queer hallowed ground, where acts of gross indecency were committed, and they’re singing Hakuna Matata.”
He found himself living in an old bus in Whitechapel and paying the bills with shifts at the exclusive Travellers Club in Pall Mall. On a walk through the city, he points out the big, grey building where he was a butler in a morning suit. Grey tails. White gloves. “Slicked hair and silver service for these Hogarthian figures who were richer than Croesus. It gave me this insight into the extreme wealth here in the UK – ‘You! Boy! Port! Here!’ – and very much where I sat, as both a person who did not have access to that world, and as an Australian, and as an outsider. I was also eating nothing but pâté and pheasant from the kitchen.”
He started working as an MC at night, and began to realise his greatest joy was in building crowd energy and throwing it to the next act. “I love that moment of staring out at the audience and going, ‘Right, we’re here in this room together, it’s immediate, it’s just tonight,’ ” he says. “You’re part of them, but you’re in charge.”
Just under two decades ago, for about three minutes, I performed as a drag queen. It was for a story but I took it seriously, practising diligently under the guidance of a local “drag mother” in Indianapolis, putting care into forging my own identity – “Miss Indy Starlet” – before hitting the stage at a local gay club there, dancing and lip-synching to Finally by CeCe Peniston. With my bouffant wig and high heels, I stood approximately seven feet tall and looked like a glamazon warrior, or possibly a very lost giraffe. But I felt amazing. Free to access another side of myself – the somewhat transgressive side that drives alone with the stereo up, windows down, gamely straining to hit the pained high notes on Careless Whisper. To a straight white guy like me, drag is subversive.
I can’t help but wonder what drag feels like to someone as utterly gay as Reuben Kaye. He’s sitting opposite me in a pub by London Bridge, sipping a gin and tonic, thick, longish blond hair pulled back, wearing a translucent white singlet top and black capri pants.
“I always used to say, ‘It’s not a character, it’s an amplifier.’ It just turns the volume up a little bit,” he explains. “My body feels like it makes sense in heels. I can be all the things I want to be. I can be incredibly sexy. I can be incredibly powerful. I can be aggressive and flirtatious and coquettish and strident, and I’m able to embody all those contradictions. And I look at myself in the make-up and go, ‘Oh yeah, this is a face people will listen to, because that’s who I am inside.’ ”
What was it like, then, when drag itself was dragged into the crosshairs of the culture wars? When Drag Queen Story Hour – events held in libraries around the world, with drag queens reading children’s stories to kids – was attacked for sexualising, corrupting or grooming minors? Kaye says it felt tired and predictable – yet another wedge seized by conservatives to hound the LGBTQI+ community. “It always just feels like, ‘Oh, this is the tactic they’re trying now.’ That particular brand of homophobia, queer-phobia, transphobia, they’re like the anti-abortion bracket – they just try everything until one thing gains traction. But it’s sad to think that they’ll use something as innocent as children as a manipulative fulcrum.”
Kaye hadn’t taken part in the library program, but he has spent time around kids in full stage regalia, including visiting a class on a UK television special, Kids React to Drag!, where he watched their non-judgmental inquisitiveness bloom. “Kids are more adult and capable of extensive rationality than we give them credit for,” he says. “They’re willing to receive information but they’re also willing to challenge you on stuff and talk about what they think is right. They want to have the conversation.”
I’m always curious about the experience of people who are high-profile members of some societal out-group or another, and whether they get tired of having to be a spokesperson for their kin. Kaye was often called on by the BBC as a talking head, and back home he’s been a panellist on Q&A. “I got asked to be on Piers Morgan once, and I didn’t really want to, but I wanted to at least find out what they wanted to ask me, and the questions were on every single hot-button issue for queer people everywhere, ranging from book bans to trans women in sport,” he says. “That’s not fair to one member of any minority.”
Questions, of course, should be expected when your act is as political as his. He’s comfortable going to more uncomfortable places, too; the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. Not easy territory, given Kaye was raised culturally Jewish, going to synagogue until his bar mitzvah. “It was a reformed ‘Judaism lite’,” he explains. “It was a lot of call and response, and sitting and reading and reciting, which I feel milks all of the beauty that faith can have, turning it into this gruel of service and prayer.” He also remembers the calls within the temple – repeated and resounding – to preserve Israel. “I was like, ‘I’m trying to make it through school, I’m getting the shit kicked out of me, what the f--- do I care about this?’ ” One of his recent solo cabaret shows, Hard to Swallow, is largely inspired by the division that’s emerged since the October 7 attacks, and the further atrocities it wrought, now broadcast and fed to the world. “But I don’t agree with organised religion at all,” he says. “I think it’s a way of combining nationalism with lovely calligraphy.”
He works with a bunch of people to interrogate his arguments, making sure they’re bulletproof before sharing them on stage. Pianist and composer Shanon Whitelock is one such collaborator. “I’ve worked with a few people who worked with Reuben prior to me, and they all ask the same thing: ‘Is he still really angry?’ ” says Whitelock. “He is. And that manifests in his shows as satire, and that makes it fun, but underneath it is real anger. He wants to make a point.” They met more than a decade ago, Whitelock answering a Facebook post from Kaye seeking a music director for a gig at the Perth Fringe Festival, where they spent two days rehearsing together. “Reuben had that ADHD energy, always jumping around,” says Whitelock. “At the end of that I pretty much went, ‘This guy is nuts – this isn’t going to last.’ ”
It does make me wonder how a performer who is so used to producing his own solo shows – writing and directing, lights and costumes, press and sales – will go when rowing a long boat with a big crew, as he’ll have to on Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Will Reuben Kaye play well with others? “I don’t know the answer. I hope I do!” he says. “I do wonder what will happen – whether my inherent mistrust of conformity or my desire to be liked will win.”
There exists at least some proof of his ability to assimilate and uplift – Kaye is in his second year as director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival – but it’s hard to imagine him suited to a world of emails and video chats and … groan … stakeholders. “What are you saying about me?” he asks, laughing. “Look, you’re not wrong, but you have a chance to lift up a whole bunch of people you love. In the arts, you can’t just pull that ladder up behind you.”
The dream for his career is consequently pragmatic and modest, and probably realistic. He wants to make people laugh. Anyone can get applause, he points out, because it comes at the end of every song, the fall of every curtain. A laugh is involuntary, spontaneous and contagious. And when an audience of different people with different beliefs share the same laugh in the same moment, it becomes a seed of revolution. Laughter is the sound of collective honesty.
Beyond that, he wants to be the poster child for jobbing generalist performers everywhere, storming the stage, finding his audience and cashing his cheques. He wants to prove that you don’t have to do one thing as an artist, and can make a living just being you – with room to poke the bear when the bear needs poking. “I want to make people think and wince and laugh at the same time,” he says, grinning. “It’s not enough just to thrust – you’ve got to be able to twist the knife as well.”
Good Weekend travelled to London courtesy of Global Creatures. Moulin Rouge! The Musical opens in March 2027 at Sydney Lyric.
Read more from Konrad Marshall in Good Weekend magazine:
- The heartbreaking question Mick Fanning asked his mum after losing three brothers
- Why Evonne Goolagong Cawley is choosing joy even in the face of illness
- ‘It is going to get really bitter’: Why family-will battles are set to explode
- Michelle Payne’s rise to the top was swift – then came stalkers, the agony and the heartbreak
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