Review: Daddy, Don’t Drop the Soap!

As part of Qtopia’s Pride Fest 2025, which runs throughout the month of June, I was excited to attend Daddy, Don’t Drop the Soap! in the Loading Zone Theatre. It was my first time attending either of Qtopia’s two theatres, so I was excited about being in one of its hallowed halls.

There were two dancing boys gyrating away as we entered the small theatrette and crossed the stage to find our seat: artist and photographer Travis De Jonk and his erstwhile side-hunk, Patrick Phillips. The boys set the gay ambience to ‘spicy’ for the entry of the queen herself, our daddy, Brent Thorpe.

This high-octane, muscled, senior twink/former drag queen was probably born ready to regale strangers with a story or five, launching straight into a yarn about his early years of dressing up and terrorising the Darlinghurst locals and specifically the punters at the Taxi Club in the early ‘80s (Sydney’s infamous home of gender-benders and taxi drivers alike, which closed for all time in 2012 to become a much-needed real estate agency). 

The stories were tinged with illegality and discrimination – not only for the fact that being homo was in fact still illegal then (let alone was dressing up in drag!) but for the fact that for this generation of gays/queers, they were also faced with the incredible devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS just as they were hitting their 20s. It’s a generation (and a daddy) that are characterised by a defiant hedonism and sense of community that subsequent generations have struggled to match. 

Daddy also took us from Sydney to San Francisco, the two gay meccas of the time; from bathhouses to beats, where gay culture and personal sexual identity and fantasy collide.

It is not a woke show and it was probably lucky (and appropriate) that it was an all-gay male audience, but it served as a poignant reminder that our gay history and culture is forever beautiful, in all its horniness, especially in this changed world.

– Danny Corvini