Sasha Velour, the winner of Season 9 of Rupaul's Drag Race, is returning to her birthplace of Berkeley to perform in drag for the first time there next week, kicking off a US tour with a two-week residency at Berkeley Rep.

The Big Reveal Live Show! is based on Velour's 2023 book The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, and includes personal history, lip-sync performances, and presentations about the art of drag itself. The show, which apparently has a soundtrack that touches on Stevie Wonder, Stephen Sondheim, and Britney Spears, lands at Berkeley Rep next week, opening June 4 and running until June 15 (find tickets here).

The show occasionally includes special guests, and Pride Night on June 7 will feature Berkeley-based drag performers Nitrix Oxide, Redd Fafilth, Richie Richport, and Polly Amber Ross.

"I've had the immense privilege of sharing The Big Reveal Live Show with audiences around the world — bringing the spirit of camp to the theater when we need it the most!" Velour says in a statement. "I never expected how this small drag show would grow, and explode onto the scene. Because the core of the story centers on my past and family history, getting to bring this thrilling, over-the-top, spectacle to the city where I was born (my first time ever in Berkeley in drag!!) truly feels like a full-circle triumph."

Born to academics in Berkeley and raised partly in New Haven, Connecticut, Velour's personal history is an interesting one. Before becoming a star of the Brooklyn drag scene in the last decade, Velour spent a year abroad working as a security guard at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersberg, and was later a Fulbright Scholar in Moscow, working on a project about the role of different artforms in Russian society. Her father, Mark Steinberg, is a professor of Russian history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her mother, Jane Hedges, who passed away in 2015, was an editor at Yale University Press and managing editor of The Slavic Review.

She began performing in drag in 2013 while living in Vermont, while studying at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, Vermont — she is also an accomplished illustrator and graphic designer. And she moved to New York with partner Johnny Velour in 2014.

She auditioned for Season 8 of Rupaul's Drag Race, but was selected for Season 9, which was shot in 2016 and aired in early 2017. Her now iconic wig-reveal in her finale lip-sync to Whitney Houston's "So Emotional" has become the stuff of Drag Race legend — and reportedly caused a 500% surge in streaming plays of that song in the summer of 2017. And in 2019, she performed her first solo theatrical show, Smoke & Mirrors.

See the trailer for the new show below. Following the stint in Berkeley, Velour takes the live show to the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey on June 26; Provincetown Town Hall on July 6; and Fire Island Pines Arts Project on July 12.