Review: summa dat BBC

Review: summa dat BBC | Two Cent Lion | Aurora, CO | Curtain Up! | Eric Fitzgerald

summa dat BBC, the latest offering from Two Cent Lion and presented at The People’s Building after its acclaimed run at the 2025 Denver Fringe Festival, resists being neatly pigeonholed into a single genre. It is part comedy, part confession, part ritual, part digital fever dream — yet beneath its experimental surface lies a surprisingly coherent narrative about identity, desire, and the cost of being seen. What begins as a glittering drag spectacle gradually becomes more intimate and unsettling, tracing the emotional journey of a performer whose public persona becomes both armor and a trap.

Before the show even begins, the company sets clear expectations: this is a mature piece that confronts racial fetishization, sexualized mythmaking, and the pressures placed on queer Black bodies. The production leans into humor, music, and dance to unravel the cultural legend of the “mythically endowed Black man,” but it does so with a self‑aware wink and a willingness to interrogate the line between empowerment and objectification. At the center of the story is Katrina Mist, a drag artist whose dazzling confidence masks deeper questions about desirability and self‑worth.

What the promotional materials don’t reveal — and what becomes one of the production’s most compelling elements — is how completely the show hinges on the presence of Katrina Mist, the persona through whom the entire emotional arc unfolds. Angel Garcia, credited as Writer, Director, and Performer, gives Katrina a commanding theatrical presence: glamorous, sharp-tongued, and wickedly funny, yet edged with something more fragile beneath the surface. The performance suggests a layered interiority while maintaining the spell of the drag persona, allowing Katrina to carry the full weight of the show’s questions about visibility, desire, and self‑definition.

Garcia’s physical and vocal work is the backbone of the piece. As Katrina, they glide through the space with sculptural precision, delivering comedy with bite and musical moments with a flourish that feels polished yet intentionally heightened. Their movement vocabulary shifts subtly as the show deepens — gestures become sharper, rhythms more fractured, as though the persona is straining under pressure. Garcia never resorts to caricature; instead, they let Katrina’s confidence erode in increments, revealing the emotional cost of maintaining a persona built for consumption. It’s a performance that demands both technical control and emotional bravery.

The production’s visual world amplifies this journey, thanks to the video projection design by Kevin Douglas, Executive Director, Producer, and Co-Founder of Two Cent Lion, which becomes a character in its own right. Douglas’s projections begin as shimmering, seductive textures that echo Katrina Mist’s glamour. As the narrative darkens, the projections distort — multiplying, fragmenting, and glitching in ways that mirror the pressures Katrina faces from digital gaze and cultural expectation. At times, the projections feel like a digital chorus; at others, like a surveillance system closing in. Douglas’s work gives the piece a cinematic pulse and provides a visual language for the show’s exploration of digital commodification. It’s an impressive feat, especially in a Fringe‑born production, and it elevates the entire sensory landscape.

The technical elements support the piece with a thoughtful, collaborative touch. Co–set designers Ollie Gillespie and Ariana Gonzalez-Troyer shape an environment that, while intentionally minimal, provides a flexible and unobtrusive frame for the performance — a space that adapts well to the show’s shifting visual vocabulary. Co–costume designer Ariana Gonzalez-Troyer, with a special thank‑you to Rebecca Hill for her contributions, offers well‑appointed looks that particularly shine in the opening number, where glamour and theatricality set the tone. Maxwell O’Neill’s lighting design adds clarity and sculptural definition, guiding the audience through the piece’s tonal shifts with precision, while Aspen McCart’s sound design reinforces the emotional landscape with crisp, well‑balanced cues.

Composer Miguel Sutedjo provides a musical through‑line that supports the production’s shifting moods, offering an aural texture that complements both the show’s heightened theatricality and its more introspective moments. While the score remains largely integrated into the overall soundscape, Sutedjo’s work helps shape the emotional rhythm of the piece, adding an extra layer of atmosphere and cohesion to Katrina Mist’s journey.

The People’s Building proves to be an ideal venue for this kind of hybrid performance. Its flexible space allows the show to unfold like a series of installations: shifting light, layered sound, and repeated gestures that accumulate meaning through ritual. The rawness of the Fringe aesthetic remains — intentional rough edges, bold choices, a refusal to overexplain — but here, that rawness feels like part of the point. The piece trusts the audience to follow the emotional logic even when the narrative becomes impressionistic.

What distinguishes summa dat BBC from other experimental works is its commitment to a character’s arc. This is not an abstraction for abstraction’s sake. It is a meditation on the pressures placed on queer performers of color, the seductive danger of online visibility, and the fragmentation that occurs when a persona becomes a commodity. The show never moralizes, but it invites reflection: What does empowerment look like when filtered through others’ expectations? How does a performer maintain a sense of self when their image is endlessly consumed, replicated, and distorted?

Two Cent Lion continues to carve out a space for bold, queer‑centered performance in Denver, and summa dat BBC stands as one of their most ambitious offerings. Garcia’s work is fearless and meticulously crafted, and Douglas’s projections deepen the piece’s thematic resonance. Together, they create a performance that lingers not as a sequence of events but as an atmosphere — a feeling, a question, a challenge.

If you go expecting a traditional play, you may be surprised. If you arrive open to something intimate and defiantly undefinable, you may find yourself unexpectedly moved. summa dat BBC is not a show that asks to be understood; it asks to be felt. And in the world of experimental theatre, that may be the most honest invitation of all.

For Information and Tickets: https://www.twocentlion.com/home