Randy Rainbow
Viral sensation Randy Rainbow performs Saturday at Dallas’ House of Blues
Tammye Nash | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com
Sometimes, the littlest of details can make a big impact. Take, for instance, those pink plastic, rhinestone-studded glasses that Randy Rainbow often dons in his videos — most of which parody the Trump administration — when he is “reading” notes before he “reads” a politician.
He was working a video one day when, he said, “I thought, ‘What can I do here that would be just ridiculous?’ And looking around I saw those glasses, and I thought, ‘Yeah. Those will work.’”
And they did. Rainbow said he was surprised that something he intended as a throw-away sight gag so effectively caught people’s attention. But when he realized the glasses were so popular with people, they became a kind of trademark in his work.
“I noticed people were showing up for shows wearing the pink glasses,” he said, adding that he would have official Randy Rainbow pink plastic glasses for sale before long.
Rainbow — and yes, that is his real name; “My parents are Gwen and Gerry Rainbow” — grew up in Florida in what he calls a theatrical family. His father was a musician and a booking agent for performers, and Rainbow started his own career as a performer at age 6 when he began taking ballet lessons.
Throughout his childhood and his high school years, Rainbow said, he was involved in theater — primarily musical theater. He took all the classes, went to theater camp and performed with regional theater companies. That continued into his college years, right up until he dropped out, worked a short stint as a cruise ship performer then moved to New York.
“Like everyone else” that moves to New York City looking to hit the big time, Rainbow said he worked a variety of jobs to make ends meet. Most of those jobs, he said, were connected in some way to the entertainment industry. For example, for awhile he worked as a receptionist for a talent booking agency.
Meanwhile, around 2010, Rainbow started making videos in his own apartment, setting up a green-screen and editing himself in to interviews with celebrities among other things. Some of his most popular early videos were of him making phone calls to various “boyfriends,” like anti-gay bigots Mel Gibson and Kirk Cameron among others.
In 2012, when Chik-Fil-A came under fire from LGBT rights advocates for the anti-equality stance of the company’s owner, Rainbow created the Randy Rainbow Works at Chik-Fil-A video, in which he serves chicken to a line-up of right-wingers, including Sarah Palin, on Chicken Pride Day. It ends with Rainbow and another “employee” dancing to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”
In 2015, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic ruling making marriage equality the law of the land, Rainbow grabbed attention and raked in the laughs with “The Kim Davis Cell Block Tango,” skewering Kentucky’s queen of homophobia, the county clerk who chose to defy the Supreme Court ruling and refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Then came 2016 and the rise of Donald Trump. It was a disaster for the country, but it was a comedy gold mine for Rainbow’s musical brand of political satire. His “interviews” with Trump and his spokespeople (especially Kellyann Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders) and cabinet members (most recently Betsy DeVos), along with musical parodies (“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea” and “Desperate Cheeto,” among many others) all began going viral. And suddenly, Rainbow was an “internet sensation.”
Even with his increased fame, Rainbow said he still does all the videos himself in his own New York City apartment. But he said, there have been a few changes.
“When I started, I lived in a little studio apartment, and I had the green screen and everything set up there in the living room area. Basically, the whole apartment was the studio,” he said. “But I recently moved into a larger, two-bedroom place, so I have a whole room that is just the recording studio and I having a living room, too!”
Neither his talent nor his success is limited to the internet. His current live tour brings him to Dallas on Saturday, March 24, to the House of Blues and then on to eight more stops in the U.S. before winding up April 29 in Vancouver.
While some people might wonder how a man who became famous with cleverly-edited videos will turn that into a stage show, Rainbow promises there’s nothing to worry about. He will be singing all your favorites of his songs, and there will be Q&A time with the audience, too.
Randy Rainbow Live comes to House of Blues Dallas, 2200 N. Lamar St., on Saturday, March 15. Doors open at 6 p.m. at the show starts at 7 p.m. The only remaining tickets, as of Thursday, March 24, were standing-room only general admission tickets for $27available through TicketMaster.com.
