Caravan Burlesque … Wilder West

The Substation in Newport is an amazing arts space, hosting touring artists and local events. It’s a wonderful venue to create a burlesque club. Caravan Burlesque transformed the large space into an intimate cabaret style club with catwalk stage. The rich, red drapery and Chinese screens and lanterns were complimented by the cabaret tables completed with candles. The feeling of an underground Chinese nightclub from a by-gone era was almost complete (opium of course was missing).

Finucane & Smith’s Burlesque shows have been almost universally applauded around the globe over the last several years. Perhaps it was the unending glowing reviews and my own fascination with Burlesque that built my excitement to see this in my own back yard.  I would be hard pressed to have been less impressed by the show. It started well enough with an incredibly camp dance routine by the cast to Salt-N-Pepa’s 80s hit Push it.  It was fun and silly and the audience was already hooting and hollering.  The kitsch and camp factor of burlesque was certainly going to come our way. Sure, it was poorly choreographed and the performers weren’t particularly good dancers but that was all part of the nature of the show, right? Here they were going to subvert expectations in increasingly clever ways right? Queen Provocateur Moira Finucane was first to return to the stage after the opening number, this time naked. Finucane performed spoken word to an obnoxiously loud industrial soundtrack. Interesting. I get it. I see where you are going with this.  We are going to subvert performance art and feminine beauty, making the nude into a grotesque right? Sure, it wasn’t great but yeah I’m with you.  Now a hulahoop artist from a sideshow, now a male stripper dressed as Bobafette, now Finucane again, this time as a waitress getting some sort of sexual gratification out of serving coffee with creamer… Now I’ve just started to feel like I’ve somehow stumbled into a crappy community theatre production and not in a cool and ironic way. I was hoping that we would eventually get an MC for the event, perhaps a Canter-esque comedian who could helps us on our journey.

This is a scaled down version of Finucane & Smith’s bigger shows, enabling them to bring burlesque and the grotesque to many a regional area. Perhaps the full shows have more of a narrative connection. Perhaps those shows are funny, genre busting, wild. This appears to be a largely new cast since the Caravan hit the road at the beginning of 2013, and whilst there is something delicious about seeing a woman burst balloons manically on packs of pins sticking out from genitals, breast and backside, it’s just not enough. It’s obvious that Finucane has a vision for her characters and she executes well, but after that it’s just more of the same.  The lack of polish in the artists looks more like inexperience than satire and the feminine grotesque ends up missing the mark.

The packed house, however, seemed to love what they were seeing. They hooted and hollered, applauded and gaped, fetched fresh drinks and went back for more. For me, a show which promised to be shocking, funny, erotic and seductive managed to be annoyingly mundane.

L.B.Bermingham

Image: Clare St Clare (Shannon Brooke Imagery).