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December30th

Les Coquettes Gala!

Posted in: Articles, Events, Reviews, Uncategorized

Les Coquettes’ Old Hollywood holiday extravaganza

December 11, 2011 @ Revival Bar, Toronto

The holidays are a fantastic time to put on your fanciest sparkle outfit, killer shoes, that beautiful fascinator you’ve been saving for a special occasion and head out to a cabaret show. You know how to pamper yourself the right way – VIP seats right up front, champagne on the table, and two hours of music, dance, acrobatics, comedy, and song. This year, Les Coquettes put on an elegant ode to Old Hollywood, bucking the trend of the traditional Christmas themed shows and paying homage to film noir, musicals, and the golden age of cinema.

Our scene begins on a darkened stage. Cue softly backlit fog…

FULL SHOT – STAGE

The Company, dressed in stunning evening attire reminiscent of 40s bid band musicals, slowly emerged from the shadows. As the darkness dissipated, they raised their voices in a slow and seductive version of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way. As their sparkles caught the spotlight, I was reminded of Rosemary Clooney, decked out in glitzy black gown and glittery gloves crooning Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me.

TWO SHOT – DANTE INFERNO & GEORGIE GATES

Silken-voiced Dante Inferno, poured into a soft white evening gown, played vocal accompaniment to fan dancing Georgie Gates. Showing her amazing vocal range, Dante took us through the energetic frenzied highs and breathy whispered lows of Björk’s slightly bipolar It’s Oh So Quiet. Georgie tried to keep up with the ever changing pace of the song, and it was both beautiful and comical to watch her perform a mesmerizing fan dance that dissolved into frustrated fits each time the tempo dropped.

ONE SHOT – SURPRISE HOLIDAY STAR

It was a holiday miracle – Toronto’s own burlesque showgirl and owner of the Coco Framboise School of Burlesque regaled the audience with one of her classic routines. With a giant tassel and white fur as props, she performed a routine that showed us why so many burlesque dancers take her classes. Her striptease was slow and calculated, teasing us through layers of robe, corset, and pasties, revealing a killer body with all the right curves in all the right places. Sumptuous and seductive, this lady knows how to strut her stuff and tease the audience with just a look.

FULL SHOT – STAGE

I’m a sucker for old Hollywood musicals – The Great Ziegfeld, On The Town, Meet Me In St. Louis, Gigi, Funny Girl, the list goes on and on. Les Coquettes’ man props paid homage to one of my absolute favourites in their much more erotic version of Singin’ In The Rain. Dew Lily, Le Barback, and The Carpenter performed a routine brilliantly choreographed by Kathryn Romanow. Decked out in yellow rain slickers and with signature black umbrellas, they had the audience hooting and hollering as they slowly discarded their rainy day attire – not that there was much to keep them safe from the elements; yellow hat, yellow jacket, and yellow pants. Not quite what Gene Kelly probably imagined but boy, this would have made for a much different kind of movie.

FULL SHOT – STAGE

What do you do when you’re a big western movie star that’s supposed to sound all macho manly man, but all you want to do is just get out of that horrible fringed pleather outfit, put on a pretty pink mini, and just let the true you come out? We found out when Dew Lily took to the stage in his act Honky Cat. Flanked by Dante Inferno and Lilli Bubalotovich, his adoring cowgirls, we watched as he rehearsed his big Honky Tonk number in classic country & western twang. You could see the point where the movie producer’s constant pestering pushed Dew over the edge, he’d had enough pretending, he needed to be free! With the help of his cowgirls, he stripped away all that tacky c&w regalia to change into his true self. Turning the act into a reverse striptease, he seductively slithered into a pink sparkle mini and tube top, blond wig, opera gloves, and pink hat. In the blink of an eye one of the Seven Brothers turned into one of the Seven Brides.

ONE SHOT – BILLIE BLACK

A woman in black, a chair and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling – this was the scene for a steamy ode to film noir. Sounds simple enough, but Billie Black knows how to work even the simplest set and make it into the most sensual place on earth. The level of erotica was heightened with dramatic shadowed lighting and her slow, calculated movements across the stage. Each discarded layer revealed beautiful smooth skin, accentuated by the single soft spotlight, all the way to final reveal. I don’t remember ever taking my finger off the shutter release during Billie Black’s entire performance. She is a true femme fatale, her charms ensnaring the audience with irresistible desire.

TWO SHOT – CHARITY DAWN & THE CARPENTER

I’ve always been a fan of Charlie Chaplin – he could convey so much with just his expression and he was a master comic. Some of his best routines have been recreated time and time again, this time by Charity Dawn and The Carpenter in their set Silent Film. More a cabaret number, they played a duo of Chaplins acting out his famous bread rolls table dance from The Gold Rush. They did a wonderful job of not only recreating one of the most memorable scenes in movie history, but also making it their own with the addition of just enough burlesque. After all, what’s a Chaplin doppelgänger fight without some clothes getting torn off in the process?

FULL SHOT – STAGE

“Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good!”
- Florenz Zigfield

Every show needs a big zinger of a finale. Ziegfeld knew this and his Follies always had a show-stopper of a number. Les Coquettes put together quite an energetic final piece involving all the girls in a traditional music hall cancan chorus line. Aptly named Fireworks, the cancan performance included high kicks, rond de jambe, and a lot of skirt shaking. The audience yelped along with the dancers as they shimmied on and on, seeming to feed off their admirers’ enthusiastic energy. It seemed like the evening’s revelrie would never end but with one final scandalous split it was all over. The lights dimmed and the curtain fell for another glamtastic Coquettes holiday season.

A big shoutout to the talented members of Les Coquettes – La Minouche, Le Barback, The Carpenter, The Mohel, Dew Lily, Georgie Gates, Lilli Bubalotovitch, Dante Inferno, Charity Dawn, Suki Tsunami, Billie Black, Charlotte Webber, and rigger The Control Enthusiast – with special guests Coco Framboise and additional choreography by Kathryn Romanow.
November14th

An Enchanted Cabaret

Posted in: Articles, Reviews

Les Coquettes’ twisted take on the fairy tales you thought you knew

On Sunday, October 23, I had the chance to photograph the annual Halloween showcase put on by Les Coquettes, known as “Canada’s premier cabaret ensemble.” Presented at their regular haunt, The Revival Bar in Toronto’s Little Italy, Cabaret Enchanté was a perfect mixture of classic fairy tale charm, Tim Burton creep factor, and comedy relief. The troupe mixed burlesque with old style vaudeville standards such as aerial rings & ribbons, cirque, song, dance, improv, and comedy – all to a unifying theme.

On to some highlights of the (long, sexy, hot, naughty, dirty…you get the picture) evening:

The evening’s reverie was hosted by the lovely La Minouche – that’s French for pussy…. cat – a fairy godmother with good intentions but really bad mojo when it comes to granting wishes. Decked out in richly layered brocade fabrics, she used her jeweled elfin wand to change the course of many a well-known fairy tale with some dark and twisted repercussions.

There’s nothing hotter than a full on kicking, scratching, hair pulling, girl on girl fight. When you’re a super sexy version of Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, it’s bound to happen. Facing different directions, their left arms beautifully bound in red latex tape making it impossible to pull themselves apart, Georgie Gates and Billie Black performed a Siamese twin strip while rotating on the stage. I don’t remember my childhood version of Alice including butt pinching, sensual reveals, or catfights resulting in pastie-clad hot Tweedles. I think I might have paid more attention to the storyline if it had.

The ladies (and gents) of Les Coquettes are a multi-talented troupe and make good use of their members’ many skills. Case in point – for a second piece from the popular Alice story, Dante Inferno’s Queen of Hearts belted out a hauntingly eerie rendition of Florence + The Machine’s Girl With One Eye to a captive and optically-disabled Alice (Charlotte Webber). Alice eventually managed to seduce the Queen and put her in her rightful place – tied to a chair with a crumpet in her mouth!

Some brevity was inserted into the evening with one of my favourite childhood stories – Goldilocks & the Three Bears – with the twist of a circus setting. Sporting little bear caps, Les Coquettes’ sexy manprops – Dew Lily (go ahead and hoot ladies and gents!), Le Barback, and The Mohel – hid behind the curtains like scared little boys when they heard someone coming down the aisle towards them. And scared they should be! It was none other than a very confident Goldilocks, but not how you might remember her. Lilli Bubalotovitch’s take on the character had her dressed up in full lion tamer circus attire including top hat and whip. She regaled us with feats of amazement as she put the little man-bears through their paces, prancing around the stage, performing a dance on chairs, and then stripping down to their little tighty whities. This was my kind of circus!

Every once in a while you go to a burlesque show and see a performance that makes your jaw drop, raises the hairs on your arms, and takes your breath away – one that is so well put together that all the elements just mesh perfectly and mesmerize the audience. Billie Black as Rapunzel with Suki Tsunami as her prince brought out the sensuality, romance, drama, and despair in the childhood fairytale through the ingenuous use of aerial ribbonwork. Using the the golden ribbons as a metaphor for Rapunzel’s hair, Billie began the routine with beautiful aerial work of her own, unwinding her “hair” to let it down to her waiting lover. Suki’s prince performed some stunning and skillful acrobatics while climbing towards the waiting Rapunzel only to plummet to the ground when the evil stepmother cut off Rapunzel’s long locks in revenge. I was so enchanted by the way the story was interpreted I had to remind myself to pick up my camera and take photos – it went beyond burlesque cabaret into theatre.

One of my favourite childhood stories – and one that enchants so many little girls today – was The Little Mermaid. Luckily this was an 18+ show or there would have been a lot of disappointed little girls in the audience – this was no sanitized, homogenized, idealized or essentially Disneyfied version of the tale. This was the Hans Christian Andersen version, full of unrequited love, doom and despair, tears and death perfect for a rowdy all Hallows (close enough) audience! The tale unfolded, quite fittingly, to Enya’s Orinoco Flow as Dante Inferno’s fiery redhead mermaid makes her deal with a sea witch to sacrifice her true self for a man she met on a beach. Having stripped off the vestiges of her sea life, she goes to her man dressed in her best pasties only to be cast off like yesterdays seaweed. Dying of despair, the sea nymphs carry her back into the water.

Everyone knows Carlo Collodi’s story of Pinocchio, Geppetto’s puppet that desperately wanted to be a real boy and had a penchant for telling lies. Dew Lily’s Pinocchio, however, has already become a boy and has come to the horrible conclusion that it’s just not working out for him. His only wish now is to escape this cruel world and go back to his former marionette existence. A talented burlesque artist that always has both the women and men in the audience swooning over his increasingly lascivious performances, Dew managed to outdo himself yet again with the introduction of a new prop that I hope he will continue to use in future shows. With a nod to The Smith’s How Soon Is Now, he sang his way down the center aisle of the club to climb onto a pedestal set up below the stage, offering himself up to the audience for both judgement and approval. Stripped down, he gave himself up to rigger The Control Enthusiast whose quick hands and expert rope skills soon had him trussed crucifix-style upon the dais. With the addition of newly painted joints and pins, the platform was pulled away to allow the revitalized Pinocchio a chance to test his newfound suspension with a series of sensual contortions set to a deep thrumming base beat. I don’t think I have ever seen such a breathtaking cabaret act – a suspension set with a sad and twisted tale – so beautifully performed.

A big shoutout to the talented members of Les Coquettes – La Minouche, Le Barback, The Carpenter, The Mohel, Dew Lily, Georgie Gates, Lilli Bubalotovitch, Dante Inferno, Charity Dawn, Suki Tsunami, Billie Black, Charlotte Webber, and rigger The Control Enthusiast –with dancer Rob Merrifield and additional music by Zirco Circus.