Answering hatred with glitter is a time-honored drag tradition that France’s answer to “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is keeping alive in a new stage spectacle.

The Paris Olympics may be over, but the event is still on the minds of many in the city — and not just sports aficionados. On Tuesday, the audience at “Drag Race France Live,” a stage version of France’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” equivalent, erupted in cheers at the mere mention of the Games’ opening ceremony.

The host of both shows, the drag queen Nicky Doll, made jokes about her own appearance in the outsize display on the Seine river, which was directed by Thomas Jolly. Then she hinted at the international backlash to the tableau she took part in, which some people read as a mockery of the biblical Last Supper — or even a display of Satanism.

“If I’m a Satanist, I sold my soul for waterproof products,” Nicky Doll told the crowd, referring to the downpour of rain that marred the show in July.

For French drag, the Olympics’ opening ceremony came at a pivotal moment.

France was relatively late to embracing American-style drag: While the country has a long cabaret tradition, it used to favor “transformiste” drag performers, who impersonate real-life artists instead of creating a character of their own. “Drag Race France,” the TV show, didn’t premiere until 2022. (“RuPaul’s Drag Race” first aired in 2009.) Yet the French show’s winners, and Nicky Doll, quickly became mainstream figures. The inclusion of drag queens in the opening ceremony pointed to their newfound prominence within French culture.

Yet what could have been a moment of cultural consecration soon turned sour. Shortly after the broadcast in July, a number of conservative figures in France and abroad took aim at the scene featuring drag queens. In it, the queens gathered around a table surrounding the DJ and activist Barbara Butch, who wore a halo-like headdress. While Jolly denied that the tableau was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” describing it instead as “a grand pagan festival,” he was nonetheless accused of insulting Christianity and received death threats.

The drag performers involved, too, suffered waves of harassment. In early August, Nicky Doll filed a defamation suit against a British far-right activist, Laurence Fox, over a social media post he made about the scene.

Answering hatred with glitter is a time-honored drag tradition, and “Drag Race France Live,” which premiered in Paris this week, showed French drag in defiant form. On Tuesday, the Folies Bergère, the distinguished former music-hall venue where the show runs through Dec. 14 as part of a national tour, was packed to see the cast of the third season of “Drag Race France,” which concluded on TV shortly before the Olympics.

Fan favorites like Ruby on the Nail and the season’s winner, Le Filip, were greeted with screams of delight, and during the intermission, the eager crowd swarmed the merchandise stands. The atmosphere was effusive and welcoming — much like it was on the streets of Paris during the Games.

Part of the charm of “Drag Race France” is that it is still relatively lo-fi compared to its juggernaut American counterpart, which has spawned multiple spinoffs. In the stage version, devised by the directors Manon Savary and Marc Zaffuto, the queens’ costumes and makeup are obviously over-the-top, but they perform in front of projected backdrops that look a lot like Windows screen savers: volcano eruptions, neon-lit Martian landscapes, a moody full moon.

The format is fairly basic. The 10 queens featured on this past season each star in a 10-minute tableau. They either lip-sync or sing, surrounded by a small group of backup dancers. Then Nicky Doll joins them for a live conversation, asks the audience to show their appreciation and moves on to the next scene.

In some ways, that simplicity allows for the kind of spontaneity that drag often thrives on. Nicky Doll — the first French drag queen to appear on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” before becoming the host here — has grown tremendously into her role as benevolent queen mother and now banters easily with the contestants and the audience. At one point, Daphné Burki, a “Drag Race France” judge who was also in charge of styling and costumes for the opening ceremony, joined Nicky Doll for a seemingly unplanned appearance — much to the crowd’s delight.

Yet the cast chemistry and group challenges that are such a key part of the TV version were missing. The queens only appeared together in the introduction and finale, which featured minimal choreography and interactions. A stage version of this season’s Céline Dion “musidrag” — the mini-musical TV contestants are required to stage in one episode — would have been a welcome addition.

And the cast was clearly still ironing out some kinks. Edeha Noire, a trans, nonbinary queen who movingly discussed their experience of parenthood on “Drag Race France” this season, suffered from a couple of mishaps when backup dancers failed to secure the performer’s costume properly. The finale was still a work in progress, with Le Filip casting some lost glances at her drag sisters.

Le Filip, renowned for her very French sense of nonchalance, appeared earlier in her solo tableau as a chain-smoking, hung-over sleeping beauty, nailing her comedic interactions with the dancers. But the undoubted star of the evening was Ruby on the Nail, who delivered an extravagantly detailed interpretation of “Gigi in Paradisco,” a 1980s disco number. Her spin on the diva persona of its singer, Dalida, with trembling, distorted lips thrown in for comedy, earned her the evening’s sole standing ovation.

In their onstage conversation afterward, Nicky Doll took the opportunity to nod to local history and “transformiste” cabarets, where Dalida has been a favorite character for decades. “You like this art form, and it’s a reminder that we have to go and see it live,” she told Ruby on the Nail, who nodded approvingly.

For all the backlash, however, American-style drag is now firmly a part of local culture. “We put French queens on the world stage,” Burki told the audience when she joined Nicky Doll onstage. After the summer they’ve had, she sounded close to tears. But if “Drag Race France Live” is any indication, France’s drag scene is here to stay — and slay.