London Burlesque Week: Juicy Couture

Photo by Sharon Cooper

The London Burlesque Week opening night gala was a Diving Dolphin short of a Soho sex shop. If it wasn’t a pair of rosy cheeks staring at you from above crotchless tights designed by the sponsor Secrets in Lace, it was pleather corsets and tit tassels singing Funny Honey, to the gentle sush-sush of the war boat floating on the Thames.

After the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion show that boasted pink and leopard print padded glory with matching girdles, on came the talented ladies of the main event that could easily be titled World Stripping for Dummies. While Marianne Cheesecake stripped to a Far East theme, Betty Delight evoked her inner Marie Antoinette, and the Folly Dollies danced a cheery Charleston.

The show stealer was Ivy Paige, hostess extraordinaire for the night, replete with corset and Long John Silver’s parrot perched on her fascinator, to go with the nautical theme of the evening. She informed the audience that she had been aboard all the big ones in her time, and gone down on a few – ships, of course, what else? While Captain Jack Sparrow had given her pieces of eight, she’d given him Chlamydia in return – some would say, a fair exchange. To seal the deal with her adoring audience, she crowd surfed down to the back of the room, while giving running commentary on her mike on what it felt like to sit on a man’s head.

While the opening night captured the United States version of burlesque that billed striptease at the top of the genre back between the two world wars, it watered down the original intent of burlesque to poke raucous fun at dramatic and literary works, or to simply create caricatures and bawdy sketches that brought together enticing female flesh with a bellyful of laughs.

Review published at London Festival Fringe.

London Burlesque Week

The HMS President’s War Boat