Earlier in the day Casandro had told a Post reporter, “I am just a gay guy,” to which I say “Psshaawww! Dude, you are not just a gay guy, you are like the greatest gay guy ever, and if I were a gay guy, I’d wanna be just like you.” A midget in a chicken suit, which in no way diminished the spectacle, followed him off the balcony.
Lucha VaVoom, the burlesque-wrestlingcomedy troupe from Los Angeles that trucked through Webster Hall Sunday night, is an odd sort of mess, a Po-Mo collage of exotic junk culture that attempts to leverage the kitsch of Mexican wrestling with strippers and R-rated comedy.
What you have here is a sort of wrestling for people who don’t like wrestling, a variety show for the navel-gazers and hipsters who wouldn’t dare get in the gutter with something so bourgeois as the WWE.
I’ve said it many times: wrestling is like what Dostoyevsky said about “faith,” if you get it, no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, no explanation will do.
For those of us who get it, adding “comedy” and “burlesque” to wrestling is kind of like adding chocolate chips to a chocolate cookie. Or having a side order of cocaine with your crack. An aggressive light show that would have left even well medicated epileptics convulsing did not help.
And since it was generally assumed that most of the gathered throngs wouldn’t know a hacksaw from a hawk when it came to lucha libre, the master of ceremonies took the pedantic approach, instructing the audience who the good guys were and who the bad guys were, and reminding us we were to root for the former.
As if.
Between matches we were treated to a bit of burlesque, all of it wonderful, but I am proud to say that at the end of the day the girls from New York outshone their Los Angeles counterparts with audacity and grit.
During the intermission, L.A.-based Lux LaCroix—who had earlier in the evening made her star turn doing a reversedrag striptease as a Purple Rain–era Prince — told me, “New York burlesque is more performance art, L.A. is more rockabilly.”
This made little sense coming from a girl sporting a Zorro moustache. Fortunately, in this case, the “performance art” was local gogo heroes the Wau Wau Sisters, whose trapeze act set to a Guns ‘N Roses song featured not only death-defying stunts but also a giant baggie filled with drugs. Never let it be said that I am not an appreciator of fine art.
By the end of the night there had been enough high-flying grappling, giant Day-Glo insects, booby-shaking and gender-bending to satisfy even purists like myself, and certainly the curiosity seekers had something to text each other about on their way back to the L train.
