Pearle Harbour (Justin Miller) & Sam Kruger in Pearle Harbour Walks Into a Bar | Photo by Tanja Tiziana
Oh, this was a special one.
Tucked into the House of York, a mostly abandoned little nook on the mezzanine level of the Fairmount Royal York, Pearle Harbour Walks Into a Bar, presented as part of the 2026 Luminato Festival, is a cozy, immersive and mostly classy affair. I say mostly because its featured dame gets a bit raunchy, as all the best broads do. If it’s not just my own musical theatre-loving imagination, creator Justin Miller’s indefatigable, versatile drag persona, Pearle Harbour, is serving up some Bernadette Peters this time around.
The show page described this a “micro-performance,” which is a cute little term, I guess, but sounds entirely too tidy for the formidable presence and Broadway diva energy of Pearle Harbour. With deceptively flamboyant panache, Miller has crafted an intimate character study in cabaret form, a work that packs an array of references into its fraught hour with dense, emotive complexity. Aided by Rebecca Ballarin (director) and S.E. Grummett (outside eye), Miller holds all these elements together and offers us a potent cumulative reward for our attention.
As the space only fits about thirty patrons, forcing strangers to almost snuggle each other, the situation serves as a social prompt and atmosphere builder even before Pearle arrives. Oh, and her arrival is… An Entrance! Staggering grandly into the bar, shaking the rain off her umbrella, we can immediately tell she’s… In A State. But come hell or high water, she will keep us entertained!
Clad handsomely in a tie and bronze suit jacket with fishnets, Pearle seems to have come completely undone by the loss of her treasured phone. She climbs all over us, snapping all the while, searching for an outlet to plug the damn thing in should it materialize. To drown out the loss, and a much greater loneliness, she keeps lunging for booze, but Lloyd (Sam Kruger), the long suffering (we can just tell) bartender keeps shoving glasses of water in her face—a substance she trembles at with the visceral terror of some abject, rabid creature.
It’s not really her phone that is the great loss though. We know, and she does too, that it’s just an accessible little token of some deeper, less tangible, more aching want.
Bookended by “Auld Lang Syne,” which brands this as festively melancholic, Miller shows great restraint by not making the songs a primary feature of this show. It’s a lovely surprise whenever our intrepid crooner whips one out (with some inspired arrangements by musical director Greg Morrison). There were several I was not familiar with and others that were almost painfully significant to me. “Alabama Song” crops up as the most creepily choreographed number between Pearle and Lloyd. The thematically rich nostalgia intensifies with the “Cheers” theme song and, my absolute favourite number, a “Closing Time” sing-along on ukulele! And it hit pretty hard, reuniting me with the texture of my youth. Its release, you see, coincided with my coming out, my awkward drifting through clubs, yearning for a special someone to go home with.
We never fully unpack Pearle’s neuroses—nor our’s for that matter!—though we can discern the shape of her sadness and angst—and, yes, recognize our own. Oh, and we pay allegiance to the sneaky little distraction of booze! Here’s some snapshots of the vibey tangents along the way: Her abusive father manifests as a Rodney Dangerfield type, complete with canned laughter. Things get biblical in a gay club. A complimentary bowl of peanuts becomes a punny personified joke and a Muppet-like side-kick who falls victim to Pearle’s wrath and meets a quite absurdly grotesque fate.
Most interesting for me was her relationship to Lloyd. Their dynamic is a tense ebb and flow, variously affectionate and antagonistic. They have a history. And there is a lot of The Shining (specifically Kubrick’s film) rattling about here. Lloyd was the name of the spectral bartender who served Jack Torrence, of course. In the way the Overlook Hotel represents the spaces we always find that allow us our evil, Lloyd’s Bar, an homage, represents the spaces we find that allow us our loneliness and self-destruction and shared misery.
I also felt some Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (another boozy, psycho-dramatic classic) in Pearle and Lloyd’s dynamic. Remember George and Martha with their drunken, cruel, sickly loving games? Well, during Miller’s ever-revealing moments with Kruger, a voice in the back of my head kept whispering: “Pearle and Lloyd… sad, sad, sad.”
Pearle Harbour Walks Into a Bar
June 3 to 27, 2026
House of York at Fairmont Royal York
(100 Front Street West)
60 minutes
Pearle Harbour (Justin Miller) in Pearle Harbour Walks Into a Bar | Photo by Tanja Tiziana