Burlesque is an international phenomenon, a classic entertainment form that has been reclaimed and given a new, modern context. It is also still finding an audience in New Zealand. While burlesque shows are packing out theatres in the West End, here they are still very much sub culture affairs, which is a pity. Though not exactly for the whole family, a good burlesque show has something for everyone.

Not so much ZomBurlesque. The portmanteau name is a clue – zombies mean blood, guts and horror. The promo material makes no apologies for this and warns that the contents may offend. Add the sexiness of burlesque and it goes off the scale. Much to the delight of the audience. 

I love the premise of this show. Rich in voodoo and jazz, you can almost smell the death mist rising from the bayou and claiming souls. Dr Samuel Snake-Eyes (Eli Joseph) is our compere in full Day of the Dead skeletal makeup, and along with his great friend The Reverend Dr SplitFoot (Hans Landon-Lane), a maniacal man of the cloth, takes us on a journey during which the entire cast eventually are turned into zombies. It is dark, funny and clever.  

Wonderful live music by 5 piece Goodtime Brimstone Band is a luscious mix of honky tonk, hurly burly and blues. It is such a pleasure to see a burlesque show with live music. While Dr Snake Eyes can no more hold a tune than a greased piglet, he performs with such confident showmanship, we are bamboozled and flimflammed. And that is how he likes it.

While I admire many aspects of this original and seductive show, I am uncomfortably aware that mostly we are watching very pretty girls dance and take off their clothes under the control of a voluble male compere, who is unrelievedly misogynistic in his persona and choice of jokes. Interestingly, my informal poll at half time of audience members involved in the burlesque scene in Wellington reveals similar feelings, albeit while universally admitting that they’re enjoying it nevertheless.

And it is both offensive AND enjoyable. I’m just a bit disappointed that in all of the action, there weren’t more women doing the talking and more blokes getting their kit off. It only seems fair…

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

The burlesque revival continues to strike New Zealand and the South Island, with Auckland’s circus, acrobatics, cabaret and burlesque combo of the Dust Palace staging Burlesque As You Like It (Not a Family Show) in the 2010 Dunedin Fringe festival, while Fringe 2012 features both Zomburlesque, by Wellington’s Industrial Burlesque Collective (IBC), and Milly Wonka and the Burlesque Factory by Ayla’s Angels of Christchurch.

Unlike Eve Gordon of Dust Palace, the IBC wholeheartedly embrace the voyeurism, titillation and sexual arousal at the heart of burlesque tease. Burlesque As You Like It did however include a wonderful piece of homoerotic beefcake, establishing the at times problematic sexual politics of burlesque within an overtly and self-consciously reformist platform.

MC Samuel Snake Eyes (Eli Joseph) begins a rather fine strip himself, before abruptly stopping the act while still fully clothed and naming himself a self-declared “cock-tease.” This abortive performance aside, together with a brief moment when the effective co-MC of Reverend Splitfoot (Hans Landon-Lane) gets down to his lingerie Rocky Horror-style, are the only points where the eye is invited to linger over the male form. As such, the overall effect is quite traditional in that a small number of apparently heterosexual men (Snake Eyes, the Reverend and our masterful band leader Robbie Ellis) usher in an ever increasing number of sexy women for the audience’s titillation.

This is, I might add, totally fine by me as a heterosexual male, but it does lead one to wonder what a clientele beyond straight men and queer women might get out of this show. There is a lot more than sex going on here, to be sure, but be in no doubt: sex is at its core, and the women do a fine job of disporting themselves in ways both subtle and explicit.

Two principle framing devices do however situate this display of bodies into a larger theatrical whole. 

The first is the music. As the tag line goes, “The band is live, but the girls are dead!” Somewhat surprisingly, the live music (pre-recorded material is also used intermittently for some strips) is consistently and strongly jazz, ragtime and old-style Cotton Club based. The performances are therefore infused with a deliberately confusing nostalgia and historicism: zombies of the 1900s to 1940s, in effect. Imagine Zombieland performed to the music of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong.

From this strong base of forceful, rhythmically separated, stabbing horns (trumpet and trombone), piano and an especially stomping drum kit, the musical palette builds into some later forms which themselves have mined these deep cultural reservoirs for new sounds.

The music of Tom Waits would be one point of comparison, but particularly given the deliberately shonky and over the top voodoo references, the work of the late great Screaming Jay Hawkins really springs to mind. A thunderous, highly punctuated and at times quite cacophonous noise emerges out of this. Landon-Lane even does a passable Screamin’ Jay impersonation by reprising Hawkins’ version and phrasing of the old swamp blues classic ‘I Put a Spell on You.’

The other linking element is that of the zombie itself. In the first act, this is pretty light on. It is hard to say, for example, what a 1950s schoolgirl led to disrobe by the erotic power of hearing an Elvis song over the P.A. might have to do with zombies.

The logic here ultimately is that of another punk-like sampler of forgotten American underground culture, the band of The Cramps (formerly fronted by the legendary Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, who vied with each other for the degree of nakedness and perverted titillation they could inject into their performances). The Cramps’ 1990 record was entitled Stay Sick’, and it pretty much sums up the adage of this show too.

Ultimately, the zombies are a device to celebrate perversion. Sadomasochism, the linking of sex with violence, horror, domination, submission: this is what Zomburlesque revels in.

Well done, this is a heady brew. One of the final acts entails what starts with a relatively modest strip, complete with the slow removal of long black gloves, before moving to that old burlesque classic of the performer, by now nearly naked, repeatedly spreading her legs as far as possible as she goes down to the floor.

So far, so conventional, in both its erotic charge and its physical choreography. The closer though is the removal of her bra to reveal her entire areola covered by an impressively disgusting, wet, dripping (fake) scar, which – asking for and immediately receiving encouragement from the audience – she proceeds to slowly and one can only imagine painfully remove in pieces.

This, together with a lesbian partial strip performed by a pair of zombie nurses crouched over the crutch of one of their suffering, comatose companions as they waive various pointed instruments above an admittedly discretely pulled sheet certainly produces some alarming sights, such as one is more accustomed to within schlock horror and grindhouse cinema than even burlesque as such.

Whether one actually is disturbed or not by these scenes (or, indeed, depending on one’s own predilections and personal fetishes, whether one is aroused or not) is clearly a matter of individual taste. Some scenes work better than others. The core group of four dancing girls (The Mortuary Dolls, whose real names are not given in the program) keep things tight. Dressed in the best of the classic black lingerie on stage, and with a stronger accent and punch to their more tightly choreographed movement, their return is a welcome element which helps bind the show together.

By all accounts, the IBC has been even more perverse elsewhere (tales of umbilici on stage have been circulated), and I for one would have liked our two male leaders somewhat more differentiated (both sing with a Southern-style, Cotton-Club growl reminiscent of Cab Calloway meets Tom Waits). Some of the more overtly ‘zombie’ behaviour could also be sharpened up. Sexy women gnashing their teeth in the wings is fine, but not especially distinguished.

That said, this is a very strong show which deploys considerable weight of talent, sound and bodies behind its aesthetic. A special non-zombie, non-burlesque treat is when Ellis, showing a musical and comic virtuosity which would not be out of place in the old Cotton Club’s own stage shows, effectively plays both the trumpet and the trombone at once, calling on the cast beside him to hold one instrument as he reaches to grab the next and immediately continue the same musical phrase on a new instrument.

The only real flaw is the venue of Sammy’s itself. The placing of the speakers is poor for the sightlines, and does little in the way of favours to the sound in the room, meaning that (especially at the beginning) many spoken lines, jokes and double-entendres cannot be discerned. Zomburlesque largely rises above this sonic muddiness – it is after all a bit of a stomper – but the management of Sammy’s might want to reconsider this.

Still, a fine show for those to whose taste it is directed. To quote Lux Interior: “I got my own ideas about the righteous kick / But you can keep the rewards, I’d just as soon stay sick…”  

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

The burlesque revival continues to strike New Zealand and the South Island, with Auckland’s circus, acrobatics, cabaret and burlesque combo of the Dust Palace staging Burlesque As You Like It (Not a Family Show) in the 2010 Dunedin Fringe festival, while Fringe 2012 features both Zomburlesque, by Wellington’s Industrial Burlesque Collective, and Milly Wonka and the Burlesque Factory by Ayla’s Angels of Christchurch.

Unlike Eve Gordon of Dust Palace, the IBC wholeheartedly embrace the voyeurism, titillation and sexual arousal at the heart of burlesque tease. Burlesque As You Like It did however include a wonderful piece of homoerotic beefcake, establishing the at times problematic sexual politics of burlesque within an overtly and self-consciously reformist platform.

MC Samuel Snake Eyes (Eli Joseph) begins a rather fine strip himself, before abruptly stopping the act while still fully clothed and naming himself a self-declared “cock-tease.” This abortive performance aside, together with a brief moment when the effective co-MC of Reverend Splitfoot (Hans Landon-Lane) gets down to his lingerie Rocky Horror-style, these are the only points where the eye is invited to linger over the male form. As such, the overall effect is quite traditional in that a small number of apparently heterosexual men (Snake Eyes, the Reverend and our masterful band leader Robbie Ellis) usher in an ever increasing number of sexy women for the audience’s titillation.

This is, I might add, totally fine by me as a heterosexual male, but it does lead one to wonder what a clientele beyond straight men and queer women might get out of this show. There is a lot more than sex going on here, to be sure, but be in no doubt: sex is at its core, and the women do a fine job of disporting themselves in ways both subtle and explicit.

Two principal framing devices do however situate this display of bodies into a larger theatrical whole.

The first is the music. As the tag line goes, “The band is live, but the girls are dead!” Somewhat surprisingly, the live music (pre-recorded material is also used intermittently for some strips) is consistently and strongly jazz, ragtime and old-style Cotton Club based. The performances are therefore infused with a deliberately confusing nostalgia and historicism: zombies of the 1900s to 1940s, in effect. Imagine Zombieland performed to the music of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong.

From this strong base of forceful, rhythmically separated, stabbing horns (trumpet and trombone), piano and an especially stomping drum kit, the musical palette builds into some later forms which themselves have mined these deep cultural reservoirs for new sounds.

The music of Tom Waits would be one point of comparison, but particularly given the deliberately shonky and over the top voodoo references, the work of the late great Screaming Jay Hawkins really springs to mind. A thunderous, highly punctuated and at times quite cacophonous noise emerges out of this. Landon-Lane even does a passable Screamin’ Jay impersonation by reprising Hawkins’ version and phrasing of the old swamp blues classic “I Put a Spell on You.

The other linking element is that of the zombie itself. In the first act, this is pretty light on. It is hard to say, for example, what a 1950s schoolgirl led to disrobe by the erotic power of hearing an Elvis song over the P.A. might have to do with zombies.

The logic here ultimately is that of another punk-like sampler of forgotten American underground culture, the band of The Cramps (formerly fronted by the legendary Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, who vied with each other for the degree of nakedness and perverted titillation they could inject into their performances). The Cramps’ 1990 record was entitled “Stay Sick”, and it pretty much sums up the adage of this show too.

Ultimately, the zombies are a device to celebrate perversion. Sadomasochism, the linking of sex with violence, horror, domination, submission: this is what Zomburlesque revels in.

Well done, this is a heady brew. One of the final acts entails what starts with a relatively modest strip, complete with the slow removal of long black gloves, before moving to that old burlesque classic of the performer, by now nearly naked, repeatedly spreading her legs as far as possible as she goes down to the floor.

So far, so conventional, in both its erotic charge and its physical choreography. The closer though is the removal of her bra to reveal her entire areola covered by an impressively disgusting, wet, dripping (fake) scar, which — asking for and immediately receiving encouragement from the audience — she proceeds to slowly and one can only imagine painfully remove in pieces.

This, together with a lesbian partial strip performed by a pair of zombie nurses crouched over the crutch of one of their suffering, comatose companions as they waive various pointed instruments above an admittedly discretely pulled sheet certainly produces some alarming sights such as one is more accustomed to within schlock horror and grindhouse cinema than even burlesque as such.

Whether one actually is disturbed or not by these scenes (or, indeed, depending on one’s own predilections and personal fetishes, whether one is aroused or not) is clearly a matter of individual taste. Some scenes work better than others. The core group of four dancing girls (The Mortuary Dolls, whose real names are not given in the program) keep things tight. Dressed in the best of the classic black lingerie on stage, and with a stronger accent and punch to their more tightly choreographed movement, their return is a welcome element which helps bind the show together.

By all accounts, the IBC has been even more perverse elsewhere (tales of umbilici on stage have been circulated), and I for one would have liked our two male leaders somewhat more differentiated (both sing with a Southern-style, Cotton-Club growl reminiscent of Cab Calloway meets Tom Waits). Some of the more overtly “zombie” behaviour could also be sharpened up. Sexy women gnashing their teeth in the wings is fine, but not especially distinguished.

That said, this is a very strong show which deploys considerable weight of talent, sound and bodies behind its aesthetic. A special non-zombie, non-burlesque treat is when Ellis, showing a musical and comic virtuosity which would not be out of place in the old Cotton Club’s own stage shows, effectively plays both the trumpet and the trombone at once, calling on the cast beside him to hold one instrument as he reaches to grab the next and immediately continue the same musical phrase on a new instrument.

The only real flaw is the venue of Sammy’s itself. The placing of the speakers is poor for the sightlines, and does little in the way of favours to the sound in the room, meaning that (especially at the beginning) many spoken lines, jokes and double-entendres cannot be discerned. Zomburlesque largely rises above this sonic muddiness — it is after all a bit of a stomper — but the management of Sammy’s might want to reconsider this.

Still, a fine show for those to whose taste it is directed. To quote Lux Interior: “I got my own ideas about the righteous kick, but you can keep the rewards, I’d just as soon stay sick…”

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

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Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer