Review: Villains – A Disney in Drag Parody at Planet Royale
Villains – A Disney in Drag Parody at Planet Royale
Sunday, February 8, 2026
If you’re not the hero… must you be the villain?
That was the thesis, delivered with a fearsome crack of lightning and enough camp to short-circuit the grid, as the Hairy Godmothers’ return production, Villains, took over Planet Royale to a practically sold-out crowd. The queue snaked all the way down the stairs, anticipation thick in the air. The venue was a welcome contrast to this collective’s Disney send-up at Perth Town Hall two years ago, with Planet Royale proving to be a far more fitting lair: tiered theatre seating, tighter tech on stage, clean sightliness—less community-theatre scramble, more fully realised drag cabaret. An upgrade this material, and its audience, deserve.
Our non-binary protagonist, Vill, emerged not as a polished diva but as an oddball in mismatched knee-high socks and long-limbed awkwardness—a chaotic art goblin recalling Yvie Oddly’s eccentric charm. Their opening number riffed on Beauty and the Beast’s “provincial town” energy before a book was snatched mid-song: Villainy for Dummies. Petty crimes were floated (“leave the loo seat up,” “pay in five-cent pieces”) before one political suggestion was deemed “too evil” for even this room. Tone set.
Then came the icon. The Hairy Godmother themself entered to rapture: pink foam beehive towering, glitter beard glinting, work boots stomping. “Majestic as fuck,” they declared, and the crowd agreed. Their Aussie larrikin drawl, thick with mischief, anchored the chaos that followed. Beers were conjured from their nethers (Quest beers! Tragically unsponsored), foam spraying, Vill recoiling at the taste while HG snickered at their own improvisations. “But I could also do something from the script,” they shrugged, delighting in the refusal to stick to one.
Vill wanted to be a “cool villain.” To do so, they’d meet the greats.
First up: Jae West as Maleficunt. Black bodycon, hoop skirt, horns, thigh-high boots, smoking hot and deliciously aggrieved. Her backstory? Not invited to a baby shower. Revenge was demanded via call-and-response with the crowd, and honestly, if gender reveals are the real villains, she may have a point. The crowd roared in approval.
Captain Hook followed, lamenting the practical difficulties of a hook for a dominant hand and serenading us with a sea shanty spun from Arabian Nights. A couple of “big burly men” were plucked from the crowd for participation, while HG flashed a codpiece en route through the aisles.
Vill’s own weakness? They couldn’t stop dancing to anything remotely musical, even a ringtone. What followed was an extended, delirious dance break as HG forgot their line, joking Vill had a future in the Australian breakdancing team (will poor Raygun ever be let off the hook? Or perhaps she’s replaced Steven Bradbury with Aussie tongue-in-cheek affection). The off-script banter between the two leads throughout the show was a delight—messy, alive and gleefully uncontained.
Ursula reimagined herself as “The Great Barrier Queef,” with swept up-do perfection, purple glitter and impeccable ruching, backed by a bowl-cut eel named Neil (the latter contrast to Cruella by this performer only underscoring their skilled embodiment of eccentric characters). Ursie’s lament about unrealistic beauty standards didn’t quite hit the highs of other numbers, but her queer backstory reveal (simply, “I’m gay”) was met with cheers. A small but meaningful tonal shift from the source material’s coding of difference as monstrous.
Then: the Princes. Cloaked, ominous, and quickly unmasked as crypto-bro catfish Aladdin, horse-obsessed Phillip, and a Prince Charming registered sex offender clutching a souvenir shoe. To the tune of I Wanna Be Like You, they crooned about gaslighting and alpha status. The narrator quipped that they’d been written by women—“that’s why you’re fuckwits”—and the princes fled mid-explosive diarrhoea. If Jafar’s absence was notable, the decision to recast heartthrob heroes as villains proved sharper still, skewering entitlement and fragile masculinity with satisfying bite.
Cruella’s dominatrix entrance—bondage pups in tow—was chic rather than haggy, closer to Emma Stone’s high-fashion rendition than a caricature. When Vill declared, “The real villain is heteronormativity,” Cruella gagged theatrically. Yet beneath the costumes and camp, there was an earnest pulse: Vill didn’t want to destroy the kingdom. They wanted purpose. Clarity. Identity.
The show ended abruptly—an invitation to an orgy and a shouted “Pass me the lube!”—before bows were taken with barely a breath between. But the real encore belonged to the Hairy Godmother. Mop in hand, pondering, “Is this art? Is this changing the world?” They stripped to frilly pink knickers, performed a shoey, and flashed a flaccid sock with evangelical zeal.
Is it changing the world? Maybe not beyond its glittering echo chamber. But for 60 breathless minutes at Planet Royale, Villains offered something radical enough: queer joy without apology, satire that punched up rather than down, and a room full of people laughing at the systems that try to script us. Sometimes that’s villainy enough.
CAT LANDRO
Photos by Peter Tsimop 2024
