At turns deeply personal, delightful, and stridently academic, Sasha Velour's 'The Big Reveal Live Show!' brings with it a solid helping of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.

Berkeley native Sasha Velour has never performed in drag in Berkeley before, and her Bay Area appearances since becoming a nationally known star on Rupaul's Drag Race have been few. Based in Brooklyn, trained in illustration and graphic design, and born to academic parents, Velour is something of a polyglot of drag language, as much a performer and performance artist as a visual artist and comedienne. She's also, as she proves in her solo show The Big Reveal Live!, which opened Wednesday at Berkeley Rep, an astute chronicler of drag and camp culture — all of which helped her to be crowned the winner of Rupaul's Drag Race Season 9. (Ru is nothing if not a celebrator of camp culture and drag history, and she appreciates a queen who is well versed in both.)

I wasn't sure what to expect in a 90-minute, one-woman show by Sasha Velour, but I imagined there would be some stunning looks and high drag style — check! — and some stellar lip-sync numbers with dazzling and imaginative costume reveals — check check!

What I didn't really expect, having not read Velour's 200-page 2023 book The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, was a hearty portion of analysis and a brief lecture on the role of drag in culture, or an oral treatise on the definition of camp vis a vis low and high culture, and how Christopher Isherwood and Susan Sontag had it all wrong.

The show begins with some disarming video footage — and her parents seem to have shot a lot of it in her boy-childhood! — of early theatrical performances little Sasha did for her supportive grandmothers and parents. It was one of her grandmothers, in fact, that first asked her if she knew what "drag" was, and the other grandmother, a Ukrainian immigrant who lived in the Bay Area, who used to love going to see the queens perform at Finocchio's, and, reportedly, "danced on the tables" herself.

We don't get an exhaustive history of Velour's career — only the juvenilia — before she moves quickly into a discussion of drag in the present day, preaching to the choir, albeit intelligently, about the harmlessness of drag in a culture as fixated on hate, violence, and amplifying our differences as ours is. As Velour says, drag isn't about pretending to be another gender as much as it is about expressing the freedom to be whatever your heart and imagination can conceive for yourself, and reflecting that freedom back on others.

Velour curates a terrific array of pop music to perform to, leaning into favorites like Dionne Warwick, Deep Purple, and Whitney Houston — and even turning a Stevie Wonder deep cut, "Another Star" from Songs in the Key of Life, into a drag number.

The two most impressive and effective numbers come in the middle of the show. The first is a lip-sync to "Heavy Cross" by Gossip, a rollicking pop-rock number with vocals by the great Beth Ditto that opens with the lyrics "It's a cruel cruel world to face on your own." Having just introduced her guest stagehands, including husband Johnny Velour, it becomes a four-person dance number and a glorious, unapologetic celebration of queerness.

While a couple of other numbers, including a closer using Dionne Warwick's version of Bacharach's "A House Is Not a Home" and a knockout version of Sondheim's "Losing My Mind" from Follies, could also be called showstoppers, Velour's singular coup de grace may be an extended telephone-themed sequence that is like an audio collage providing one definition of "camp" across film, reality television, and pop music, from Lady Gaga's "Telephone," to Alexis Neiers leaving a voicemail for Nancy Jo Sales. It goes on almost too long, but that's part of what's so funny and irreverent about it, with the little red retro prop phone repeatedly ringing and Velour slamming it down between every audio clip.

Does Velour succeed in defining, or redefining, drag or camp for a new generation? Not exactly. Do a few of her lecture moments border on preachy and are not all that revelatory? Kinda! But none of that really matters, and the show has a way of quickly pivoting and making no excuse for its indulgences or mistakes — opening night for this limited engagement, by the way, went on, in true drag style, with no preview performances to get the kinks out.

Velour says as much, without directly quoting Taylor Mac — who, it should be said, must be a spiritual godmother to Velour — who famously likes to quip "Perfection is for assholes." Drag is made more wonderful by the spontaneous, the messy, and the unplanned, and while this show is quite polished, it still brings with it the thrill of something a little unhinged, and Velour performs her numbers with a raw fearlessness that feels innate.

Eight years out from her star turn on the Drag Race stage, Velour is certainly proving she has the talent and ambition to push her career beyond cabarets and Las Vegas revues. She's an artist, through and through, and The Big Reveal Live Show! feels like the beginning of a larger and genre-bending body of work.

Previously: Berkeley Native and Rupaul's Drag Race Winner Sasha Velour Brings Her 'Big Reveal' Live Show to Berkeley Rep