Review: "Señor Babyhead" Is the Actor You Didn't Know You Needed Right Now

Señor Babyhead

Written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores

Presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks

94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan. NYC

October 24 and November 1, 2025

The history of immigration in the United States boasts no shortage of governmental racism and inhumanity, with our current moment, however extraordinary in certain aspects, part of a recurring pattern. The solo show Señor Babyhead, written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores, who is also responsible for its make-up, costumes, and props, including a full-head papier-mâché mask for one memorable sequence, approaches this dark topic with a clowning sensibility, a sharply honed sense of absurdity, and a refusal to cede to the audience the comfortable distance of passivity. With its recent performances part of FRIGID New York's fourth annual Days of the Dead Festival, a celebration of life and death inspired by the Día de Muertos, Señor Babyhead expertly embeds trenchant critiques in hilarious set pieces that showcase Raya-Flores's formidable comic talents.

The eponymous Señor Babyhead is a Mexican actor known for playing a man pretending to be a baby in order to act as an FBI informant. Carrying an oversized baby bottle, and wearing a diaper and a shirt open over his hairy chest and beer belly (represented by a novelty t-shirt), the pompadoured Babyhead cuts a ridiculous figure only made more so by the gait and posture with which Raya-Flores inhabits him. Makeup gives him a (somewhat sparse) moustache, but it also hints at elements of both the clown and the calavera. Assuming that he is in a room full of fanáticos, he informs the audience that he is going to reenact their favorite episode of his show, the Día de Muertos Especial, which it turns out involves his character ending up alone in the 127-degree desert, where he will be visited by three spirits. The first is an elderly man who crossed the border from Mexico into the United States in the 1920s and lived through Operation Wetback in the mid-1950s, joined in the scene for purposes of translation (he speaks only Spanish) by his TikTokker granddaughter. Raya-Flores plays both characters at once–with the disjunction between the hysterically funny caricature of the granddaughter and the scathing historical facts that she periodically adds lending the latter even more force. The second spirit is a recognizable figure whose identity we won't spoil here, appearing in a Shania Twain-soundtracked segment that is a burlesque in both senses of the word. And the final spirit is less a person than an invitation to accept complicity and subhuman status in exchange for being able to remain in the United States.

From the opening scene, Señor Babyhead incorporates dance, song (including a comedic rendition of "Without You" and a humorously melancholy but thematically appropriate Linkin Park cover), and audience interaction, with spectators prompted to, among other things, chant, sing, even test out a can of "Raid Especial, for the sneaky cucarachas." Raya-Flores handles the interactive elements deftly, and just as deftly weaves some moments of discomfort into the show. Babyhead's melodramatic singing and acting provide plenty of laughs, and his narcissism, in leading him to draw attention to parts of his own performance, sometimes also draws attention to the legitimately impressive physicality of Raya-Flores's performance. That physicality is of a piece with how Señor Babyhead heightens almost all of its elements for an experience in which hilarity and pointedness are inextricable.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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