BWW Reviews: THE HURLY BURLY SHOW, Duchess Theatre, July 12 2012

As the curtain rose, I looked around the very mixed house, wondering if the women were here to see beautiful clothes discarded and if the men were here to see clothes discarded beautifully - or whether that was just a bit too glib a summary of a burlesque audience in 2012. When the curtain fell, two hours or so later, I was none the wiser with regard to that question, but I had a much broader appreciation of what burlesque was all about.

Miss Polly Rae and her band of naughtily negligeed Hurly Burly Girlys are really old-fashioned music hall entertainers. They sing, they dance and they play it for laughs within a theatrical genre that they clearly love and respect, even if it does, to this burlesque virgin, feel a little bit like panto alternating with late night MTV videos. Highlights include Miss Coco Dubois' bantering with the house (stopping the audience participation stuff just before it started to wear), Miss Polly Rae's dazzlingly array of costumes, topped off with a luminous green kimono for the finale and a witty and sexy pastiche of Olivia Newton-John's Physical, headbands and legwarmers included!

Benny Hill's theme music welcomed the girls onstage (and Yakety Sax raises a smile on the most tired of faces) and there were laughs from start to finish with plenty of double entendres from Coco and Polly to go with the exaggerated shapes thrown by the girlys. There was flesh on show, but not much more than one finds on the Daily Mail's website, and even the S and M sequences were so stylised that only the prudish could take offence. Miss Polly Rae has absorbed the British approach to sex as entertainment that runs from Donald MacGill's seaside postcards to the Carry-Ons and on to the 70s sitcoms, before it stops. Feminism and rather less innocent approaches to sex as entertainment on video and then online, caught it in a pincer movement, but Polly wants to bring it back. The Hurly Girlys are this decade's answer to (Benny) Hill's Angels.  

Whether burlesque appeals is - like so much about humour and beauty - a highly individual question. For every member of the audience who finds it like a panto without a plot or a revue comprising sketches each with the same punchline, another will appreciate the wit of the repartee and the allure of the women - dressed and undressed.

The Hurly Burly Show continues at the Duchess Theatre until September.

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