Overview
WQXR presents drag performance artist and violinist Thorgy Thor! Enjoy an evening of laughter, music, and campy fun as we kick off PRIDE with pianist and composer Conrad Tao, The Stonewall Chorale, and the wind ensemble Sugar Hill Salon. We’ll have laughs and insights from trans comedian Sunny Laprade and a dance demonstration from Queer Tango! And there will be beer tastings from Brooklyn Brewery including their Stonewall IPA.
If you’re part of the LGBTQ+AI community or an ally – come spend a fun evening with Thorgy and friends at The Greene Space!
*Premium ticket gets you a reserved seat in the first two rows (SOLD OUT)
Credit: Photo provided by Artist
Guest host Thorgy Thor is an NYC based drag performance artist, professional musician and TV host. She was a contestant on the Emmy Award-winning show RuPaul’s Drag Race and has appeared in Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle, VICE, WWHL with Andy Cohen, and is a cast member of Dragnificent! on TLC/Hulu. She is a multi instrumentalist, playing violin, viola and cello in Thorgy and the Thorchestra! She’s done shows with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, Charlotte Symphony Orchestra.
Credit: Photo by Brantley Gutierrez
Conrad Tao is a leader of the new generation of classical music. The pianist and composer has amassed a steady stream of awards and critical acclaim for his performances, compositions and recordings. A former prodigy, Conrad has emerged as a mature, thoughtful and thought-provoking artist with both a singular vision and the talent to realize it.
Credit: Photo by Eden Strader
Sunny Laprade is a standup comedian, storyteller, and viral internet creator. Her material ranges from dating horror stories, to observations about working in television, and her experiences as a queer transgender woman.
Sunny performed her first hour of comedy at Alfred University in 2017 at just 17 years old. She produced and hosted monthly standup shows at Hampshire College from 2020-2022. In November, 2021 she founded and produced the sold out 5 College Comedy Festival which hosted over 20 comedians from across the Northeast. Her first 75 minute comedy special, Queer Enough, which she filmed, wrote, and produced, ran for two nights to sold out audiences and was released to the public on YouTube in 2022.
Laprade was a semifinalist in the 2021 New York Queer Comedy Festival, a finalist in the P3 Comedy Festival, a finalist in the 2023 Far Out Comedy Festival, and a finalist in the 2023 New York Queer Comedy Festival. She performs all over the country.
Credit: Photo provided by Artist
Based in New York City, the Stonewall Chorale is the first LGBTQ chorus in the nation, founded in 1977 in a Greenwich Village living room by “people who dig each other.” Over the span of its 47 seasons, the Chorale has become an important cultural presence in NYC performing arts, producing three concerts a year in venues that include Merkin Hall, Carnegie Hall, Church of the Ascension, Riverside Church, the Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Alice Tully Hall, and Avery Fisher Hall.
Sugar Hill Salon is one of the first chamber music series and artistic collectives that centers on black and brown woodwind artistry in classical music. We are a black and queer-owned organization that offers free public concerts in Harlem that showcase wind repertoire that lacks representation within “traditional” chamber programming along with uplifting black and brown musicians performing them. Through commissioning chamber works and monthly concerts featuring artists on the scene, Sugar Hill Salon is decolonizing classical music for a more equitable future for black and brown communities.
Queer tango is a collective project, a queer inflection of the Ríoplatense social dance practiced internationally and with important roots in Buenos Aires.
Luna Beller-Tadiar is a queer mixed-Filipinx dancer and multimedia artist who works in choreography, video, text, and comics. She currently teaches regular queer tango classes at The LGBT Center on 13th street, organized by Arty Zhang and Noah Wharton of Queer Partner Dance NYC.
Phi Lee Lam is a queer Tango artist and organizer who facilitates experiences at the intersection of artistic, somatic, and contemplative practice. She is an immigrant from Singapore who has lived in several continents including Argentina where she first encountered tango danced by two queer women switching roles.