Boon-esque: 50 Shades of Cabaret

"Reinventing the romance novel with a dash of burlesque and barbershop." – how can you resist that pitch!

Playing to a capacity crowd on opening night, these 7 talented ladies presented a very different evening of vintage tease, acappella singing, and reading from Mills and Boon Novels in the form of vignettes. The opening night technical glitches were worked around, and the audience loved it.

The performance by Bobby and the Pins was confident and the singing tight, and the choice of songs supported the themes of historical, intrigue, sweet, desire, sexy, medical, erotic and military taken from the Mills and Boon books.

The ladies of Le Tableaux Burlesque are to be commended- the idea behind this show is great. It could benefit from work on the narrative, and using the story of the finding of “nanna’s secret collection” would help introduce and tie the separate pieces together. I look forward to seeing an expanded version on a bigger stage.

Shirley Jensen