This Must Still Be the Place

Burlesque continues to bump along in a few flyspecked theaters around the U.S., its tarnished sequins blinking bravely in the murk of purple spotlights, its audiences of sailors and cackling oldsters still faithful to an art form that refuses to give up.

Now, after more than 20 years' absence, burlesque is grinding away again in Manhattan. This week marks the 40th for a show called This Was Burlesque, starring Ann Corio, durable (circa 50) doyenne of U.S. strippers. And Harold Minsky, whose very name used to mean runways and rhinestones, tassel twirlers, talking women and top bananas, is back in town with a new show for the first time since militantly moral Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banished burlesque and even the word Minsky from theater marquees.

Hello, Everybody. Obviously produced on a G-string, This Was Burlesque has succeeded in reviving for mixed company some of the stag-night atmosphere in all its raunchy glory. It is like old times. Candy butchers, though a little self-consciously, hawk their dubious wares up the aisles during intermission, the world's worst orchestra is in the pit, the scenery is ghastly, the lighting garish, and the choreography might have been devised by a dancing bear. During the "Hello. Everybody" number, one of the magpie-voiced chorines flounces down to the footlights and squeals classically, "We will shimmy and we will shake, but please don't think we're on the make."

The comics are in full caper. One baggypants warns the guard of a nuthouse not to send any mail to Washington. "Why not?" asks the guard. "He's dead," replies the overripe banana, skittering into the wings. Seltzer bottles spew, leers are leered, strippers strip and strip. Ann Corio re-creates her "parade strip," fragrant in the memories of generations of Harvard graduates who used to attend her frequent symposia at Boston's Old Howard. When hefty Dolores Du Vaughan* undulates out of her costume and starts to give the proscenium arch the business, there are howls of "More, more!" from the audience.

Tomtoms, Teddies. Harold Minsky, 48, is the first to admit that his Follies at the International, a Broadway nightclub, is not classic burlesque. Its bumps have been shock-absorbed into harmless thank -you-ma'ams, and its grinds are exceeding fine. But only a purist could carp: it is a spectacularly busty pageant, flashily costumed, dizzyingly aswarm with near-nude (pasties here and here, a twinkly bikini there) show girls. If it owes a greater debt to the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas than to Minsky's old National Winter Garden theater on Houston Street, that is the way Minsky wants it. The nearest thing to a striptease in the proceedings is a number in which a covey of chorus boys gingerly pluck parts of the costume from the frame of a stately brunette. She finally helps by sliding out of her black lace teddies unassisted, but it is all done in the brightest of spotlights and to the accompaniment, not of the traditional tummy-tossing tomtom beat but the blare of a stage band's pseudoprogressive jazz. It only seems like old times.

* A prosaic moniker alongside such inspired noms de dishabille as Gaza Stripp, Helen Bedd, and the ecclesiastical ecdysiast. Norma Vincent Peel.

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