Bash Compactor: ‘Lesque’ Is More

What better way to spend the holidays than to slum it?

While Burlesque is the new guilty-pleasure flick everyone’s snickering about, instead of a trip to the cinema this holiday weekend, I sauntered over to the Laurie Beechman Theatre to check out the opening night of Boylesque, an unauthorized parody of the film. But how did those theater queens get the goods on Cher and Christina Aguilera’s showcase before the movie premiere? “We read an early script floating around,” publicist Ron Lasko confided with a smirk after the show. The apt subtitle is “It takes a bad Cher impersonator… to make a boy a star.” Drag matron Mimi Imfurst plays a Rubenesque wannabe Cher and Candi Shell from the band She-Dick plays Chris Tina, the Christina Aguilera part, a dweeby boy from a small Ohio town who moves to Akron with the burning desire to star in show biz, but instead somehow winds up at The Boylesque Lounge, a seedy gay shithole run by the world’s worst Cher impersonator. Chris transforms from boy clothes to slutware in this soap opera of bitchy drag queens, hot bartenders and sleazy customers. Shell delivers the goods by skillfully going from a simpering loser into a sexy, trashy girl at the club who doesn’t need to lip sync but can actually sing. My eyes started to run just a bit, but maybe it was my mascara.

Ironically, my arm candy for the night was new-boy-toy-intown Tony Caserta, a kid from rural Pennsylvania who also has the burning desire to make it big here in the big bad city and is already getting work as a party promoter. He loved every minute of Boylesque, from the impressively professional Imfurst, who I thought needed more inner bitch, despite gestures like the trademark Cher “snap out of it” slap in the face, to special guest Dallas DuBois as a budding drag performer Halle Tosis, who pulls off a hilarious dance number. “You don’t need to look any further than the trailer for Burlesque to know that it is ripe for parody,” said writer/director Zack Carey. Well, duh. If you like campy over-the-top cabaret humor that mixes every stereotype in show biz with every gay cliché known to man, woman and she-male, you have until Dec. 17 to catch Boylesque.