Funny Girls
Blackpool's best-known drag cabaret, staging big themed revues in a restored 1939 art deco cinema two minutes from Blackpool North.
Alternative drag and drag monsters
Horror, art and gender-defying drag: what it is, Mr Blackpool, Halloween shows and where to look.
Alternative drag covers drag that isn't trying to look like a glamorous woman or a handsome man. Drag monsters go further: horror, gore, aliens, creatures and nightmares, built from latex, prosthetics and paint. Performers can be any gender, and the point is often to break the idea of gender altogether.
Where it comes from
Club kids, punk and performance art have always fed drag. In the 2010s the American horror-drag competition The Boulet Brothers' Dragula made "filth, horror and glamour" a recognised style, and drag monsters now perform all over the UK.
Blackpool's alternative scene
Blackpool's drag is best known for traditional camp and glamour, but the alternative side is growing:
- Mr Blackpool by Harry Clayton-Wright, a Blackpool-born theatre maker and co-founder of the We're Still Here! heritage project, is billed as an end-of-the-pier show at the end of the world. It mixes drag, dance, magic and sideshow, and came home to the Grand Theatre in 2026.
- Halloween is Blackpool's monster season. Funny Girls' 2026 Halloween show, Coven Queens, features movie monsters, Broadway witches, a Rocky Horror nod and a drag Frankenstein, running from mid-September to the start of November.
See Halloween in Blackpool and drag kings and alternative drag.
Blackpool's sideshow roots
Alternative drag fits Blackpool's history neatly. The Golden Mile was built on "freak shows", illusions and the strange; drag monsters take that tradition and put the performer in charge of the spectacle. See Colonel Barker and the Golden Mile.
Making your own
Rainbow Creative Hub
A new arts club for LGBT+ people on the Fylde coast, held at a creative studio in St Annes.
We're Still Here!
An artist-led project building Blackpool's first permanent collection of LGBTQ+ heritage, with oral histories, a history club and exhibitions.
The Rainbow Creative Hub in St Annes is an arts club for LGBT+ people on the Fylde coast, a good place to find collaborators.
More
Drag and performance: more pages
Drag performersQueens, kings, dames, trans showgirls, faux queens and alternative drag, and where to see them.Drag queensThe Funny Girls company, Garlands residents, Drag Race stars, the legends and where to see them.Panto damesThe 2026 Grand Theatre panto, forty years of Grand dames, Danny La Rue and how dames relate to drag.Trans drag queens and showgirlsTrans women in drag and cabaret: the showgirl tradition, what it means and Blackpool's welcoming stages.Drag kingsFrom Vesta Tilley to the UK's first drag king bar in 2015, and where to watch for kings now.Bio queens and faux queensWomen who perform as drag queens: the names, why many dislike "faux", Drag Race UK's first and more.Every identityThe full list, the long acronyms and UK law.