Brimming with powerhouse vocals, tawdry razzamatazz and in-jokey sentiment, this musical - extrapolated by Steven Antin from his silly 2010 film in which Christina Aguilera’s small-town Ali becomes a star in the neo-burlesque club run by Cher’s imperious Tess - is also kind of fun.
There’s self-aware snap in the self-consciously daft dialogue, energetic choreography and the songs – by Aguilera, Sia, Diane Warren and lead performers Jess Folley and Todrick Hall – are either great or mercifully short. The action has been relocated from LA to New York.
I’d take this daft paean to self-empowerment through wiggling around in complicated underwear over many other recent stage adaptations of established cinematic properties, from Mean Girls to Clueless. Which is frankly a surprise, because in advance Burlesque looked like a sequin-studded, gusset-flashing car crash.
Hall, a YouTuber and rapper who’s appeared on American Idol and The Masked Singer as well as on Broadway, wrote eighteen and a half of the show’s daunting 25 songs (not to mention reprises). He plays Sean, the fabulously camp consigliere to club owner Tess (NY performer Orfeh, a mixture of Debbie Harry, Dolly Parton and Ethel Merman, apparently formed in a wind tunnel).
Between the Manchester opening in 2024 and the London run Hall also took on the roles of director and choreographer from Nick Winston. The set, costume and lighting designers were replaced. During previews at the Savoy the actors’ union Equity was said to be supporting the cast over unspecified “issues”.
You wouldn’t get much sense of this from what’s on stage now, apart perhaps from an eye-rolling aside from Hall’s Sean that his back is sore “from carrying this show”. The production is polished, whether spoofing or succumbing to established tropes.
Here, Antin makes explicit the implicit suggestion that the club is Ali’s true family: Tess is her long-lost mother. It takes almost the entire, nearly three-hour running time for this to come out, and then only thanks to the panto villainy of Tess’s ex-husband Vince (George Maguire). Ai’s flirtation with a dodgy mogul who wants to take over the club has been axed: perhaps it’s not wise for American artists to mock NY property developers right now. Aguilera is this show’s executive producer.
But the broad strokes of the story are still there. Ali wins the friendship and eventually the love of barman Jackson (Paul Jacob French – thuggish-looking, but in a good way, according to my guest, my 25-year-old goddaughter). She supplants unreliable, bitchy headliner Nikki (a barnstormingly strident, hip-jutting Asha Parker-Wallace). She and the stern, autocratic Tess reach a rapprochement after much strife.
More importantly, the whole trashy ethos of burlesque, and by extension showbusiness, is here, punched home in the signature numbers, written by Aguilera and others. Hall takes Jess Folley’s Ali through a history of the genre, framing it as female empowerment. His songs include a boyband spoof and the frankly perverse Call Mama Daddy.
Folley, herself a graduate of TV musical talent shows, makes a wryly charming Ali in her acting debut, and exhibits a vocal range to rival Aguilera’s. Orfeh belts out Cher’s anthem from the film, You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me, with spirit but it comes too early, in the first half. The second act degenerates into ironic laziness, occasionally galvanized by arch or bombastic numbers.
Glossy back-projections take us from Iowa to Manhattan. There’s a nod towards body positivity and trans inclusion among the lithe calves and twinkling buttocks. The costumes include a pair of cocktail-olive brassieres for the lissom twins performing a number called Dirty Martini, and a corset adorned with wing mirrors and protruding whips for Folley. Lights strafe and confetti cannons eventually ejaculate. This enjoyably absurd musical based on an enjoyably humdrum film is far better than I could have anticipated.
The Savoy Theatre, to Sept 6; thesavoytheatre.com
