This 45 minute Gay Sex Drag Cabaret Opera combines classical opera / new music with verbatim 1st-person retellings of West Coast gay sexual experiences. From rapacious to tender, at its core this piece shows universality among the experiences we try to hide away.

Cocktales with Maria is sex-fuelled live-singing semi-operatic drag romp into the real lives of the modern West Coast gay. The result of a 4-year collaboration among Victoria composer Isaiah Bell, drag opera diva Maria Toilette, and concert pianist Karen Lee-Morlang, the word-for-word real-life sex stories of a group of Vancouver gay men are molded into a fun, serious, touching and shocking camp trash opera cabaret theatre piece.

The whole thing is gorgeous. It is brilliant. Joel Klein is brilliant. It is the most beautiful camp thing I’ve ever seen. I loved it. I loved it. It is so touching, it’s not just funny.
-Sky Gilbert, Canadian writer, actor, academic

Through the dulcet tones of Maria’s voice, you will re-live: The Play Session (the actual transcript of a BDSM play session), Berlin 1997 (a beautiful bathhouse hookup), The Tent (a first time experience - with a counselor at evangelical church camp), Hymn (negative religious aftershocks), The Football F^@# next Door (a simple personal best), The Bird Lover (an awesomely terrible hookup with a guy from Squamish who lets wild birds roam free in his apartment) the self-explanatory Sexual Neuroses Patter Song, and The Dirtiest thing I’ve Ever Done.

On Saturday, May 30 audiences will get all the benefits of Cocktales with Maria, plus an after party; at Davie Street’s private club 8x6. Performance includes an after-party – play party – open to all sex and gender identities.