A John Waters Christmas @ The Neptune

Wednesday, November 30 • 8 pm

Legendary cult film director John Waters, aka the Pope of Trash, aka the King of Bad Taste, is on his 26th annual Christmas tour. It will be one of the few pieces of holiday entertainment guaranteed to have no hidden (or even overt!) morals. Waters has a gift for taking ordinary camp and squeezing every filthy drop from it, creating unique perverted masterpieces that nobody else can. (This is, for the uninitiated, the director that brought us the iconic line “Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat ****! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!“ via his 1972 film Pink Flamingos, which also features literal poop-eating.) For a holiday with as much cultural baggage as Christmas, there’s plenty of trash for the yuletide dumpster fire.

Waters seems to find genuine glee in the strange and obscure parts of the holiday, and is actually well-known for his annual Christmas cards. He even released a compilation album of his favorite holiday tunes, featuring both horrifying child vocals and the kinds of R&B jams that frequently score his films. If you’re looking for an anti-Christmas rally, you might want to search elsewhere; this is a den of Christmas filth, so prepare to roll around in it. This year’s production bills itself as “a combustion of Christmastly-incorrect kindling that will blaze into a glorious nut-case Noel fire from hell,” so don your finest smoking jacket, pencil in your mustache, and get thee to the Neptune.