Step Inside the Velvet Boot
It is 1927. Upstairs, the country is dry and the law is watching. Down here, a Black butch bartender is pouring, a boy nobody wanted is at the piano, and for a few hours a room full of people the world tried to erase gets to be loud, gilded, and completely themselves.
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Then a bootlegger's son and a preacher's daughter fall for each other across every line that is supposed to keep them apart, and the fragile thing this community built starts to burn.
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The romance is the spark. The community is the fire.
Speakeasy takes the architecture of Romeo and Juliet and asks a bigger question: what does it cost to keep joy alive when the world is built to erase it. It is a love story, a jazz record, and a reckoning, and it is drawn from something real.
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The Velvet Boot is invented. The world it lives in is not.
This Really Happened
In 1927, drag performers were headlining nightclubs across America, and audiences lined up around the block to see them.
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By 1929, Chicago alone had more than 35 queer clubs packed into a few blocks of the Towertown neighborhood. Gene Malin was the highest-paid nightclub act in New York. Gladys Bentley, in white tie and tails, ran a room on the South Side that nobody who saw it ever forgot.
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It was called the Pansy Craze, and for a few extraordinary years, queer joy wasn't hidden. It was the headline act.
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Then Prohibition ended, the morality laws tightened, and in less than a decade the whole thing was raided out of existence. Clubs padlocked. Performers arrested. A history so thoroughly buried that most queer people alive today have never heard it happened.
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Speakeasy isn't a metaphor for that history. It's built directly on top of it.
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Read the full story in Waymon's essay, "They Danced, They Dazzled, They Disappeared."
A drag performer is led away during a 1920s vice-squad raid, New Yor
Music That Hits You in the Body First
Big band brass, torch-song intimacy, gospel lift, a jazz score that sounds like 1927 and 2027 at the same time. From glitter to grief, every number is built to land in the chest before it lands in the head.
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The songs are written and performed by Waymon Hudson, a Deaf composer, late-deafened as an adult, who works through vibration, sensation, and touch. What you are hearing is a score built to be felt.
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Start with "Come to the Speakeasy" (the doors swing open), "All That I Am" (the heart of the show, alone under one light), or "I Carried the Sound" (the room's survivor, testifying).
Everyone Here is Speaking Easy
In a world where the wrong truth gets you killed, every character carries something they cannot safely say. The show is what happens when they stop staying quiet.
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Merc, the heart of the room. Can I spend my life protecting a happiness I may never get to have?
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Miss Addie, the one who stayed. What does a generation owe the one that comes after it?
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Jules, the preacher's daughter. Who am I if I stop living the life chosen for me?
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Rome, the bootlegger's son. Can tenderness survive the violence I inherited?
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Ty, the cop who can't look away. What happens when your duty and your truth can't both survive?
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Frankie, the one who stayed steady. What do you owe the people you keep safe, before you ever let yourself love them?
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Marco, Miriam, and Sgt. Delaney, the machine. What happens when certainty curdles into cruelty?
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That is not a love triangle. That is a world. And two of these roles, Merc and Miss Addie, are the kind performers wait a career to play, with Frankie right behind them as the room's quiet, funny, steady heart.
Why Now
The backlash that ended the Pansy Craze is running again, almost move for move. The clubs get raided. The books get banned. The joy gets legislated against.
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The villain in Speakeasy is not a person. It is a machine: the law, the pulpit, the fear, and the silence they all demand. That is what makes a 1920s musical feel like it was written this morning.
"They didn't die for who they loved. They died because they dared to love out loud."
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Speakeasy does not whisper about any of it. It belts.
Roles Worth Fighting For
Speakeasy was built to put the people usually pushed to the margins at the dead center of the stage. It offers powerful, leading roles for Black, brown, queer, trans and gender-expansive, and Deaf and disabled performers, and a company that gets to be joyful, dangerous, funny, and fully alive.
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Drag performers. Butch bartenders. Queer musicians, flappers, and found family. A room that finally belongs to the people in it.
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This is not a diversity footnote. It is the fabric of the show. Its creator writes from inside part of that experience too: Waymon Hudson is late-deafened, and the commitment to Deaf and disabled performers on this stage isn't a gesture. It's personal.
For Producers, Festivals, & Presenters
Speakeasy is a complete, submission-ready original musical: full libretto, original score, professional demos, and a pitch and production packet. Broadway-sized in ambition, and fully producible at any scale, the jazz score charts for a small combo, the ensemble flexes, and the single-set world is a designer's friend.
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It is also not a one-off. Speakeasy is the theatrical property in a larger body of work, a horror franchise, a memoir, a music catalog, all from one studio with one preoccupation: making things people feel in the body. When you take on the show, you are working with a creator who knows how to build an audience for it.
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Its creator is late-deafened and built this score by feel rather than by ear. That is not a footnote. It is one more reason Speakeasy reads as a singular artistic voice rather than a familiar formula.
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Primary development targets: NAMT and the O'Neill. Available now for readings, festival consideration, and licensing conversations.
From the Creator
Hi. I'm Waymon.
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I wrote this musical, every word, every note. I'm also Deaf, late-deafened as an adult, so I wrote it without hearing a second of it, composing through vibration, memory, and touch: the arm hair that rises when a chord is wrong, the heat in my chest when it's right, the speaker on the floor under my feet. On paper I'm the last person who should be able to write a jazz score, which is exactly why I had to find out whether feeling was enough. It is. The whole show is my proof.
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But Speakeasy isn't really about me. It's about the drag queens who danced when it was dangerous, the butch bartenders who ran the room, the elders who survived so someone else wouldn't have to. I found their history buried, and I couldn't put it back
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I may not hear the music anymore. But I can still feel it.
And I promise, you will too.
The Lights Stay On
Speakeasy is on its way to the stage. Follow the road there, first listens, live sessions, and news from the Velvet Boot.
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Speakeasy news lives here alongside everything else I'm building, essays, music, and more.