Immodesty Blaize - The Adventures of Walter's Burlesque!

Synopsis

A burlesque musical reviving the long lost arts of tasseling, tease and other classic 'Burly-Q' must-haves, all wrapped up in a truly sparkling will they/won't they plotline sizzling with innuendo!

Our Review:

4 May 2005

After the 2004 Olivier Award-winning success of C’est Barbican - that updated the art of burlesque to a contemporary, highly intimate idiom in which the acts were ordered off a menu and performed directly at your table - there’s now an inevitable attempt to revive the form in the West End, too.

But the desperately repetitive and frankly banal spectacle that is Immodesty Blaize and Walter's Burlesque! has neither the spectacular wit nor subversive allure of its predecessor. Most fatally, there’s a lot of attitude and posing, but no sense of danger or spontaneity.

As I watched it feebly unfold, it made me pine first of all for Gypsy (Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ 1959 musical, set in the world of vaudeville and burlesque, that has had two major Broadway revivals in the past 20 years, but none in London). Then, as it went on (and on), it quickly made me wish I were anywhere else at all. In the end, Burlesque!...