The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Dead Sexy
By Ross
With Halloween around the corner, I’m finding myself surrounded by gothic murders and monsters at every turn. I witnessed a trio of Goblins giving us all a Macbeth that was both wonderfully smart and outrageously funny in an interactive landscape at the Tarragon Theatre, Toronto. I was also led through an old historic house – the Campbell House Museum also in Toronto – for an adaptation and reworking of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque, which fascinated and gave me haunted shivers with flames, bangs, and screams around each corner and down every hallway. Both are astonishingly good. And then last night, at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in Manhattan, NY, a burlesque show called Dead Sexy shimmied in on stiletto heels with plastic fangs, infused with a smashing of horror-comedy. It came charging in from the dark recesses of a mad scientist’s evil laboratory (“and cabaret show“), determined to titillate and entertain with what they referred to as a “unique blend of thrills, chills, and burlesque“
Attractive horror monsters drenched in blood and desire are escorted in and presented one after the other, reigniting the revival of this Off-Broadway hit comedy thriller, adapted, written, and directed by Jonny Porkpie (Filthy Lucre, Pretençión, and The Corpse Wore Pasties). Running Saturdays in October downstairs at the Laurie Beechman Theatre (inside West Bank Café at 407 West 42nd Street at 9th Avenue), these creatures of the night attempt to bring Dead Sexy back using all the formulas of burlesque at their disposal just in time for Halloween. I believe I caught the second to the last performance, with one more remaining on October 26th (click here for tickets and information), but if erotic striptease experiments are your thing, delivered by a determined group of zombies, vampires, and monsters, than this unique mash-up of burlesque and theater might just work for you. But I can’t really say that it did it’s dark sexy magic on me or my companion.
You can’t kill what you can’t see, yet led by the sinister scientist, Jonny Porkpie, and assisted by a motley crew of monster misfits made up of a horny ornery assistant, a sneaky seductive intern, a sexually charged professor and a few other creature creations, the Professor delivers a lectured address about reanimation, sneaking in a love story wrapped and chewed up inside. The whole thing is comically playful and silly as can be, created in desperation to have some sort of romantic reunion with his dearly departed love who finds herself down a few flights below, all alone, in the flaming depths of the Nether Regions. Each experiment conducted is a test of love, starring a cast of frighteningly seductive burlesque stars trying hard to work their alluring monster magic on this cabaret audience. Starring Jo Weldon, Jonny Porkpie, Syn Sultress, and Tigger! with special guests Peekaboo Pointe (10/12 & 10/19), Mr. Gorgeous (10/19), and The Maine Attraction (10/26), these glamorous ghouls try to flirt and titillate on the stage of the diabolical Doctor’s Evil Laboratory (& Cabaret), playing their scenes of terror with a wink and a jiggle. It doesn’t exactly entice, after seeing the more solidly created burlesque shows that are delivered out in Brooklyn by Company XIV, but it is harmless Halloween fun, played with a big wide smile and a few pasties thrown on for good measure. It’s a monster mashup straight down to hell with one flip of a switch, laced up with the hopes of a happy ending. But don’t get those hopes up too high.
