Arts Festival Review: The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook

Taylor Mac may be a hypnotist, too. Photo / Supplied

Taylor Mac looks absolutely fabulous. He sashays on to the stage, an exotic butterfly of mesh, glitter, tassels and a shock of fiery red hair.

He is the New York cabaret performer who a reviewer once described as David Bowie meets Tiny Tim. It was probably his dramatic stage makeup and ukulele skills that prompted this comparison.

But Mac - who, it emerges, is part philosopher, part comedian, part impersonator and part drag queen - believes the act of comparing is a form of violence.

A passive-aggressive way of stripping someone of their individuality, if you will.

Over the years, Mac has been compared to Jesus, Ricky Schroder as a child actor, Moby and Lady Gaga.

And though he bridges his eccentric performance in the mystical Spiegeltent with Bowie and Tiny Tim covers (including Rock'n'Roll Suicide, Lady Stardust, Tiptoe to the Window), he proves he is actually entirely original, and probably best described as a figment of your imagination you never expected to meet.

He builds such an intimate rapport with his audience that no one seems to mind when he gives two couples in the audience a taste of infidelity, or when he kits out another in glitter and his own wig.

It might all sound, to use a Mac word, a little "cray cray" (a youf term for silly, for those who are unfamiliar), but Mac has the uncanny ability to create a sense of normalcy.

Why else would a group of strangers simultaneously rise from their seats and pretend they are in a big, sticky chewing gum bubble while he sings Bowie's Heroes?

Perhaps he is part hypnotist, too.

Auckland Arts Festival

Where: Palace Spiegeltent, Aotea Square.

When: Final night tonight