With family-friendly roots that date to 1951, Cornyation was devised by San Antonio Little Theatre director Bob Salek to lampoon Fiesta’s stuffiest tradition: the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo.
For its debut at the Arneson River Theatre during A Night in Old San Antonio (NIOSA), comically named duchesses paraded ridiculous gowns for King Anchovy before he crowned the Empress of the Cracked Salad Bowl. By 1965, Cornyation had evolved into a bawdy satire that got thrown out of NIOSA — only to be revived in the 1980s as an uncensored romp at Bonham Exchange. In the 2000s, Cornyation settled into its current home at the Empire Theatre.
More than half of a century after its inception, Cornyation remains an irreverent Fiesta fan favorite that gets crowds roaring. During six performances on three nights, between 10 and 12 volunteer groups present campy skits mocking local and national politics, current events, pop-culture icons and plenty in between. In keeping with Fiesta’s mission to be “a party with a purpose,” Cornyation is a heavy-duty fundraiser that’s donated millions to local AIDS charities and LGBTQ+ organizations.
Although Fiesta fanatics are well aware of the Cornyation basics, there’s plenty about the beloved event that remains unseen. In hopes of going behind the scenes, we sat down with Rick Frederick and Chris Sauter — married San Antonio creatives who’ve been involved with Cornyation for more than a decade. While they were happy to share insider trivia and colorful anecdotes about the skits they’ve helped bring to life — mishaps and all — details are still under wraps for this year’s Cornyation, which is set for April 21-23, when King Anchovy LIX Marty Schlesinger will preside over the Court of Highfalutin Radicals.
But first, a little background.
Rick Frederick
Born and raised in Detroit, Rick Frederick studied fashion design, ceramics and dance in college but ultimately found himself feeling directionless.
“I was like, this is way too expensive to not know what to do,” Frederick told the Current. “So I dropped out.” After a stint doing improv and frequenting renaissance fairs, he found his way into the Detroit theater scene through a conservatory program. With professional experience under his belt, he relocated to Chicago and spent 13 years there working with a theater company. “It was great but then 9/11 happened and everything was crazy,” he recalled. “It was really difficult to do left-leaning political work in a climate where everybody just wanted musicals. So I pulled back from the theater company and started working for Thomas Blackman and Associates, who runs the international art fair Art Chicago.”
Through his work there, Frederick met San Antonio artist Chris Sauter, who was exhibiting work in Chicago. After hitting it off, the pair struck up a long-distance relationship and Frederick eventually moved to San Antonio in 2005. Frederick took a job at Liberty Bar and his introduction to Cornyation came via coworker Matt Wolff, who was designing skits.
“I jumped in and did makeup for them because I had a theater background,” Frederick said. “That was when it was ‘tortilla time’ and it was crazy backstage with lots of drinking. And the audience was crazy. I was just like, ‘What have I fallen into? This is amazing.’ It was really appealing to be [part of] this San Antonio culture with tortillas flying around and this exuberance.”
Frederick eventually took over design duties for the group — with Sauter among his players — until he became one of the event’s emcees. A self-described “theater freak,” Frederick recently celebrated his nine-year anniversary at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, where he serves as the Creative and Resident Relations Director as well as the Producing Artistic Director of the Tobin’s 100A Productions, a local theater company that’s now in its third season.
Chris Sauter
Born in San Antonio and raised in Boerne, Chris Sauter is an accomplished visual artist whose work has been exhibited at the McNay Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1. Primarily working between sculpture, installation, drawing and video, Sauter has creatively explored the intersections of science and religion, the construction of identity and, as he puts it, “why people believe things that are not true.”
Sauter’s unique perspective and mastery of unexpected materials made him an ideal fit for a Cornyation designer but he started as an actor in one of Frederick’s skits.
“I played George Bush,” Sauter said of his debut, which involved him and a troupe of short-shorted female soldiers emerging from underneath a massive gown worn by Cornyation duchess Dana Montana — who was decked out to evoke oil personified. “People didn’t notice that we were scurrying in underneath the skirt so we could pop out at the end. It was pretty amazing,” he added.
The following year he played televangelist Ted Haggard in a skit referencing his scandal with a meth-dealing male prostitute.
In 2012, Sauter began designing skits for his own group, which has won Cornyation’s coveted Spirit Award multiple times.
“I’ve populated my group with a lot of people who have the skills to make things,” Sauter explained. “We start meeting in January and making props. We’re pretty prop heavy — it’s narrative-driven and costume-driven. I try to keep it duchess-focused so [there’s still] a connection to Coronation. … I have all these fantasies about what to do for Cornyation each year [and] I have a dark sense of humor. … I’m doing something really dark [this year]. I’m making the duchess’ antebellum dress out of white trash But I’m not going to give away too much because it’s totally about surprise this year.”
Outside of Cornyation and his career as a visual artist, Sauter works in the art and art history department at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he earned his MFA in 1996.
Corny trivia
During our chat with Frederick and Sauter, we learned quite a bit about the inner workings of Cornyation. For starters, there are no rehearsals with the full cast. Individual groups hold offsite rehearsals but the entire cast isn’t in the same room together until the first show of the year.
“The first show on Tuesday is essentially our dress rehearsal,” Sauter confirmed. “And nobody knows what anyone else is doing,” Frederick added.
The skits are limited to four minutes each with a maximum of 10 people on stage at the same time. “So it’s months of work for 24 minutes on stage,” Sauter continued.
Amusingly, Cornyation’s opening-night performance coincides with the actual Coronation, which takes place right behind the Empire at the Majestic Theatre. Situated back-to-back, the sister theaters share dressing rooms — meaning that Coronation gets half and Cornyation gets the other half — and “duchesses” from both events are getting dolled up in close proximity at the same time.
Another lesser-known tidbit, the Cornyation Spirit Award is an internal affair based on participant voting. Beyond bragging rights and a DIY trophy, the winning group gets to select the winning group the following year.
“You get the trophy for a year and you add [elements] to it,” said Sauter, whose group won the Spirit Award in 2025. “They recently retired the old trophy, which was so big it had to be carted around on a dolly. It was actually two trophies strapped together.”
Confessions of an emcee
During his stint as a Cornyation emcee, Frederick shared duties with other announcers including Dana Montana and former Current editor Elaine Wolff. Oftentimes, Frederick wasn’t given the script until the day before opening night.
“It was already hard to work a full-time job at the Tobin and then do two shows a night,” he said. “Whereas all the crews are going on for four minutes twice a night, the emcees are on full-time. They have intermission breaks and then they go back on. One time I was backstage waiting for the curtain to open, and I was just standing there with my eyes closed because when you go on, you’ve got to fuel that crowd. [Former Cornyation emcee] Michael Quintanilla taught me how to do that. I modeled myself after him, but it takes a lot of energy. … It’s this balance of trying to keep it fresh and improvisational. That’s why working with Elaine was really good: she knows everybody and would tell me, ‘So-and-so is in the audience. Say this.’ [One night] Elaine was like, ‘There are a ton of former King Anchovies here tonight. So after the start of the second act, let’s call them out and cheer them.’”
Once they’d toasted the royalty in the crowd, a voice rang out from one of the Empire’s top boxes: “What about me?!” That voice belonged to former San Antonio City Council member and former King Anchovy Debra Guerrero.
“She was not on my list and she kept yelling back down. I was like, ‘Bitch, sit down! This isn’t about you tonight!’ I didn’t know her … but I do now. Every time she sees me, she’s like, ‘You’re the only person brave enough to call me a bitch in public!”’
Trump dump
Likely unbeknownst to him, Donald Trump has been a Cornyation fixture since at least 2016. Thanks to Sauter’s darkly creative sense of humor, Number 47 is frequently associated with Number 2.
“I’m really into the scatological,” Sauter confessed. “Well it’s Trump — what can you do? I’ve had Trump in my skit many times. In one of my favorites, Trump was a big pig head based on Lord of the Flies but [our version] was Lord of the Lies and there was shit flowing out of his mouth. And our duchess was [the embodiment of] shit, so she was blowing diarrhea. It was amazing. And she danced to “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches. But [Cornyation Director] Ray Chavez didn’t want us to say ‘fuck’ so I [bleeped it with] a farting sound.”
“I was throwing turds out of Trump’s mouth that knocked over the ‘shithole countries’ and got buried in a pile of shit,” Frederick added.
Another year, Sauter’s skit employed George Michael’s 1998 arrest as a peg for a Texas “bathroom bill” skit that rained down on Trump. “We had a giant toilet and our duchess came out of it dressed as George Michael. And then, while standing on a toilet, she transformed into the Duchess of Pee. Her dress was covered in pee and she was peeing on all the people around. … [We used] shiny, yellow Chinese paper yo-yos [to simulate that].”
Having built it, Sauter was rightfully concerned about the safety of his eight-foot prop toilet on wheels.
“The toilet started moving,” he said. “And she was really high. So she’s surfing this thing as it’s moving. … Fortunately, I saw it happen and since I was playing a ‘Squatty Potty’ prince from the Squatty Potty commercials, I just went out early and held the toilet so she wouldn’t fall. … And then all these golden streamers came down from the ceiling and we had a Trump from someone else’s skit come out and frolic in them to ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ Because at the time the news was about him liking to get peed on by Russian prostitutes.”
Measles in the Magic Kingdom
Drawing creative inspiration from a Disneyland outbreak, Sauter designed a skit titled “Measles in the Magic Kingdom” that employed Disney songs as narration. Although his group has rehearsed at local venues including the Guadalupe Theater and SAY Sí, Sauter has also made an impromptu stage out of the front yard of his artist studio, which happens to be a former church on San Antonio’s East Side.
“We were out there with our Disney heads on and we’re all vomiting. It was gross but people just loved it. We had an audience and they were getting their pictures taken with us. … I just love this kind of impromptu theater [and that people were wondering] what do they do in that church?”
Making people cry
“People cried last year, and that was why we won,” Sauter said of his group’s 2025 skit. “It was all about how Trump was wanting Greenland, Gaza and the Panama Canal. So we had him as a voracious, hungry big baby and our Duchess was the world. We made a dress that was as big as the whole stage — it was a big map split into five sections. Five of us were inside of the dress with our heads sticking out wearing little hats that said Gaza or Greenland or Canada. And then Trump’s like, ‘I’m so hungry, feed me!’ So we had Elon Musk come out in a Cybertruck and he started taking bits of the earth and feeding it to Donald Trump. He ripped chunks of the dress off until our duchess was naked. She looked like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and [Trump’s] diaper kept getting bigger … and eventually it exploded. All of us who had been ‘eaten’ had turned into the poop so we flew out and plopped on the floor. And then our secondary duchess [came out] dressed like a smiling sun in a dress striped like all the Pride flags — she was like the personification of DEI. She started watering the poop to the [1965 song] ’What the World Needs Now Is Love.’ We were all dressed as flowers underneath the poop and we started coming out to the song ‘Rise Up.’ People just started screaming and crying because it started out so horrible and [ended with] this uplifting moment.”
Credit: Rick Frederick
The Big Payoff
When asked about his favorite Cornyation moments from the last 14 years, Sauter turned away from dark humor to celebrate the event’s true soul.
“Cornyation was invited to the gala for Thrive Youth Center, which is one of the organizations that we give money to every year,” he said. “They awarded us and I was invited to represent Cornyation. It became really obvious to me at that moment that we have an impact. What we are doing has an impact. That’s what keeps me here. One of the reasons why I keep doing this is because it’s for charity. It’s all fun and games, and we like to poke fun at our politics. But in the end, it’s really about service to others. And that’s very meaningful.”
$18.30-$67.10, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, April 21-23, Charline McCombs Empire Theatre, 226 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 226-5700, majesticempire.com.
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