A Va-Va-Voom Boom
A Burlesque Revival Takes Off in Washington

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Gird your loins, boys and girls. Burlesque is back, and it's officially made a home again in Washington.

In the past five months, three burlesque shows have established residency at three D.C. venues -- from M Street and Shaw in Northwest to the H Street corridor in Northeast. Each show has a different style: One is straight out of vaudeville and sideshow traditions, one seeks to summon the classy cabaret atmosphere of the 1930s and '40s, and the other fits in with the District's gay performance-art world. The unifying theme: the art of the tease.

It's not stripping per se (even though it kind of is). It's strip teasing. It's artfully surrendering certain parts of one's assemblage while performing dance or comedy or some combination of the two, usually with a yukster emcee, sometimes with other singular acts (lounge lizards, sword swallowers, drag kings). And people -- even in this era of explicitness -- are coming to see the wit, the glamour and the flesh, all bejeweled and bowed up as a reclamation of femininity, a harking back to old times, the seductive broadcast of a political statement.

Washington got its first taste of burlesque's new era in 2002, when Baltimore's Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey performed in the vaudevillian Lobster Boy Revue, which played at the 9:30 club, Chief Ike's Mambo Room in Adams Morgan and the Birchmere. Now the city is seeing a blossoming of semi-professional burlesque acts inspired by that first wave of Trixie, the Hate Monkey and the World Famous Pontani Sisters from New York.

The fan base is swelling, but the audience in this century is different from the last, says D.C. writer Kelly DiNardo, who blogs about burlesque and wrote "Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique" (Back Stage Books, 2007), about the famous performer who toured through burlesque-friendly clubs on H Street during the '40s and '50s.

"Whereas then your audience was primarily made up of men, now you have a 50-50 audience," DiNardo says. "I think there is this desire to put the tease back into sex, to put the imagination back into sex, to take ownership of your body, of your sexuality. And I think women who perform in the neo-burlesque movement have taken that voice back to it."

The voice is louder and prouder, and it comes from real women (sometimes with stretch marks, sometimes with wrinkles) who have real day jobs (corporate trainer, barista, teacher's aide). Together, they exude a retro innocence guarded by precisely placed pasties but project something a little more complicated than bare skin.

Three nights, three venues, three very different burlesque shows. Read on to learn more.

The Reclamation of Womanhood at the Dutch Oven Burlesque

Stuffed in a 49-square-foot closet are four bouncing bosoms, a Boston terrier named Harry the Horrible and enough fringe and glitter to clothe a chorus line from Bethesda to Berlin. This is the cramped green room at the Palace of Wonders, the weirdo vaudevillian bar on H Street NE, a half-hour before showtime. The women are talking about the whys and hows of this burlesque revival.

"At the workplace, the more feminine you are, the more credibility you lose," says Shortstaxx, a.k.a. Kris Roth, 42, of Takoma Park. "This is a parody. It's really drag. It's almost playing a woman."

"It's reclaiming it," says Sable Sin Cyr, a.k.a. Katie Gray, 26, who also performs with the Gilded Lily Burlesque in Baltimore.

"It's exaggerated," says L'il Dutch, 34, a Falls Church resident who likes to keep her on- and off-stage identities separate. "Think Sophia Loren. Think fembot. Think Marilyn Monroe."

" I think Divine," cackles Staxx as she pulls a bulgy jockstrap over a baseball-patterned G-string, the eventual centerpiece of her Americana performance during the monthly Dutch Oven burlesque show. (This must be mentioned: Staxx's first public performance was to music from the opera "Carmen." She choreographed a routine in which she twirled her tassels while dying. She continued twirling even as she lay on the ground, expired.)

The scene in Washington is still emerging; most dancers have been at it for only a year and a half or so. Sable and Staxx attended Trixie Little's burlesque boot camp, and L'il Dutch started the Palace of Wonders show in March after being inspired by the Pontani Sisters at the Birchmere's semiannual burlesque shows.

Now there are enough area dancers to supply a monthly show with a rotating cast. And so backstage, some last-minute preparations:

Spritz some hair spray on the wigs.

Jiggle a bit to check the security of the pasties.

Kiss toward the mirror and then head out onto the teeny stage, surrounded by a barful of people and vaudevillian knickknacks lining the walls. L'il Dutch teases with the hokeypokey and performs with Harry the Horrible. Sable, in a Bettie Page wig, lays out a beach towel and bumps a beach ball into the audience. Priscilla Jerez, the Palace of Wonders' general manager, who performs as Prissy Pistol, storms around the stage to "Livin' in America." Shortstaxx spits into a baseball glove and fields imaginary balls. All of this is done to music and emceed by the curly-mustached Gary Gutter (who happens to be L'il Dutch's husband). Articles of clothing are expertly removed and discarded, leading to the big reveal (or big tease, depending on how you look at it).

Here's the thing: Whether they're rapt or befuddled, everyone in the audience is paying attention. Even the drunk ones. Twenty people watch the closed-circuit video of the stage from the bar's second floor. Fifty more are squished together below, whooping or gaping. Smiles creep onto boyfriends' faces as they realize what they've been dragged to by their girlfriends.

More shows: The Palace of Wonders features burlesque every week, regularly hosting Gilded Lily from Baltimore and the Hellcat Girls from Philadelphia. The quarterly Evil Come Evil Go-Go Show returns Aug. 9 at 10 p.m. and Oct. 31 (for a Halloween spectacular). Priscilla Jerez's Wild West-themed show, Bang Bang Burlesque, debuts in October.

The Dutch Oven burlesque show. Once a month, resuming Sept. 13. Palace of Wonders, 1210 H St. NE. 202-398-7469. http://www.myspace.com/lildutchburlesque or http://www.palaceofwonders.com. $10.

A Time Warp at the Golden Triangle Cabaret

Duck into the side entrance of Ozio, the glossy cigar and martini lounge on the 1800 block of M Street NW. Walk past the door girl wearing a green nightie ("Hiya," she squeaks) and up two flights of stairs, and you'll find yourself in the 1920s. Or '40s. Or maybe '50s. Whatever it is, it's a stab at vintage: The hosts of the Golden Triangle Cabaret wear three-piece suits, the bartendresses wear corsets and a cigar girl is in mid-sentence as Louis Prima swings over the sound system.

"We were barflies at the same bar," says the red-haired cigar girl, Baltimore resident Chelsea Thompson, 25, her aura a sweet cloud of clove smoke. She's talking about Kitty Victorian, the resident dancer at Golden Triangle and a professor at the District's Burlesque University ( http://www.burlesqueuniversity.com), who drafted Thompson to work for the two-month-old Golden Triangle Cabaret on an upstairs floor of Ozio.

"How are ya?" Thompson says to a suspendered older man who brushes against her at the bar. Then she sells a pair of pasties to D.C. resident Pascaline Sangosse, 31, who brought her boyfriend. Does he like it so far?

"What man wouldn't?" Sangosse says.

And the pasties?

"I thought, 'Why not?' "

"Enjoyyy it," Thompson says in a Clara Bow accent as Sangosse returns to her seat. Then Kitty, who makes the pasties herself, begins to slink around to the achy strains of Etta James's "At Last," pouring an oversize bottle of vodka into an oversize martini glass while daintily ridding herself of those pesky gown parts. About 50 people sit on couches or mill around, watching her strut and pivot in the middle of the narrow room bathed in a wash of blue light. Some patrons get into the PG-13 naughtiness, whooping when she strips off something as innocent as a glove.

At the bar, D.C. resident Carlos Salanova, 30, assesses the scene. The vibe reminds him of clubs in his native California. "A lot more tasteful than a strip club," he says. "I like the ambiance, the people, the offering of cigars, the vintage '50s style or whatever."

The cabaret is nothing if not earnest. The lounge singer comes in a few bars early during the instrumental track of "Fly Me to the Moon." During one set, an albino Burmese python gets tangled in Kitty's hair, which, though disorienting, is not as bad as getting bitten on the forehead by one. That's what happened to another practitioner of burlesque, Thrill Kill Jill, at the Miss Exotic World Pageant last year. ("That's what people are waiting for anyway," says Jill, who lives in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., and kept the act going after the bite. "If the act gets that good, why stop it?")

After several performances throughout the evening -- which also features jazz musicians, an illusionist, DJ London Shadows and Lindy Hoppers from the Jam Cellar swing dance group -- Kitty takes a break in the cluttered, overly lit backroom. She's wearing a chartreuse gown and heavy makeup. Her python is in its heated cage.

"He's a perfect travel buddy," she says, casting a heavy-lashed glance toward the cage before addressing how Golden Triangle Cabaret fits in with the burlesque resurgence. "We're trying to bring back the old style, the classy music. We want to bring big bands into the venue. It's definitely moving somewhere -- we're getting more hype, a bigger crowd. People want this classy style."

The Golden Triangle Cabaret. Thursdays, 7-11 p.m. Ozio, 1813 M St. NW. 202-822-6000. http://www.dccabaret.com or http://www.oziodc.com. $20.

The Message Behind the Mascara at the DC Gurly Show

A woman leans over her makeup kit and looks into a mirror, layering her eyelids with color, slowly becoming CoCo Monroe in a corner cabana in the upstairs VIP lounge at Be Bar, a slick, swank gay bar in Shaw. In one hour CoCo will be down on the stage, at least 20 times as sassy as her real-life counterpart, combining the old-fashioned art of striptease with modern music.

After studying ballet in Latvia, dancing with an opera in Germany and doing some stripping, CoCo retired from professional dancing and moved to the District in 2001. At the now-shuttered Club Chaos near Dupont Circle, she caught a performance by the drag troupe DC Kings, which featured burlesque. A friend suggested she try it, but CoCo balked.

"I'm certainly not in top physical health like I used to be, and I'm a black woman who's 250 pounds, so I said, 'Are you crazy?' " recalls CoCo, 28, a health educator who lives in Silver Spring. She was introduced to Kitty Victorian, who told her burlesque isn't limited to certain body types. (Her first assignment was to Google "Dirty Martini," a famous curvaceous performer.)

So CoCo attended one of Kitty's classes, adopted a stage name and was in on the ground floor of the DC Gurly Show burlesque troupe, which eventually had its own night once a month at Chaos and has since relocated to Be Bar. The Gurly Show, with its 15 regular dancers, performs once a week as part of Be Bar's "alterna-queer dance party," called Be: XX.

There, in cabanas in the upstairs VIP room, the gurls and the DC Kings get dressed, put on the lipstick and paint on the sideburns.

"My entire life I had been looking for a way to express who I was, and not who someone thought I should be at the time," CoCo says. "Never in my performing life have I been given so much autonomy over every aspect of the piece, from the costume to the choreography to being able to make a piece that has a message or something that's just for fun."

Burlesque dancers have always sent some kind of message. The first wave of performers in the first half of the 20th century made a point simply by being: These were women who earned a paycheck for themselves and often commanded billing above male comics and musicians. But one of the hallmarks of today's burlesque movement is the injection of a message into the act. Such as dressing up as a housewife, preparing a pie onstage and then sitting in it.

CoCo is one of the last performers on the bill. When her time comes, she bounces up the Be Bar dance floor to Lenny Kravitz's "American Woman" and stops near the steps to the main bar area. She wears a red silk blouse and workplace-appropriate black skirt. A stack of magazines sits on a chair on the stage. CoCo pages through them, scoffing at the rail-thin models pictured. Then, as Kravitz digs in, she tears out the pages and crumples them in defiance.

To drive home her point, the clothes come off next, revealing a supernova beauty and an eyeful of raw emotion.

DC Gurly Show. Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. Be Bar, 1318 Ninth St. NW. 202-232-7451. http://www.dc-gurly-show.com or http://www.bebardc.com. $5 cover after 10 p.m.