(seen at the 4pm performance on 12th July 2025)
Miss Kitty LeRoy (Katie Dunsden, in for absent Faye Tozer) runs “The Mint” – a gambling saloon in the Wild Midwest of America, circa 1888. She relates her sad story to link just under two hours of burlesque acts, two featuring "Lady Luck" herself – Dita Von Teese.
The steaks are high (priced) – a meal and show ticket for the front rows and tables run £205 for three courses and a drink. Even the balcony, where you watch everything through a Perspex screen (the safety rail is up to a standing person's waist), will set you back £95 if you can’t grab the £80 restricted view seats in the corner.
The matinee was far more reasonable – the monkey paid a mere £20 (and was kindly upgraded to a far better seat as it wasn’t a busy performance), but is it worth the real prices?
Honestly, they have spent a fair bit. The stage has a revolve which can also move vertically, rising with all lights lit to give a little class to proceedings. Indeed, the lighting rig is worth losing sightlines for, as it makes the simple diamond stage with saloon doors and a couple of staircase balconies look pretty good.
The acts are also on the acceptable end of burlesque. You’ll see more flesh on a public beach – it’s large pasties and “granny’s handkerchief” for the ladies, topless but keep those chaps on, chaps, for the gentlemen. Only one sequence features silhouette nudity at the back of the stage, as the dancers dress for the occasion.
Put another way, the monkey was very confused as to why some of the audience around it felt the need to whoop as they swooned. Still, if their own love lives and fantasies are this limited, it is delighted they can find release here.
It found the whole affair slightly less sexy than a Disney animated feature, and certainly less well scripted.
With increasingly deluded explanations and exclamations, and plenty of repetitive card drawing by audience members seated on stools just below stage height, acts of varying quality walk on, remove a few clothes (given the heat, it is easy to excuse. In fact, it is a wonder more West End casts are not doing so at the moment) sometimes and leave.
Isabelle Bosher and Bethany Chan do a fairly good air act in the limited space, one of the guys also abuses a low-flying chandelier in a way that would upset the Phantom.
Tosca Rivola uses an audience plant to whip a rose head from between teeth, twice. Her blouse is also unbuttoned in the spirit of the show. A later gold hoop dance is more visually interesting with stronger use of her dance abilities.
For the ladies, the cowboy Chippendale trio are more IKEA, but seem to allow the frustrated to whistle out their emotionally uncomplicated primal needs.
Dita herself is low-key on her act one closing number, nicely lit and showing how burlesque should be done. Her second appearance to close act two is more lavish, but if you’ve seen her previous shows, nothing new either.
Kelsy Karter and Matt Peach, half of “Kelsy Karter & The Heroines” - a four-piece Australian/British rock & roll band - are in charge of the pre-show. They deliver “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You,” “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” “Be My Baby” and a few other numbers from too far back on the stage to connect with the arriving crowd. They are rather likeable, but underline the problem here.
It's the wrong setting for the wrong show. The well-run performance space is too small for the extravaganza Von Teese conceives. What is glitzy in a large room looks tacky if too close – and we are. Nobody appears to have considered how the show should be directed, pace or emotional engagement.
There isn’t the space to really let the dance rip, spread out and allow the atmosphere to permeate every corner of the auditorium. More to the point, with tickets this ridiculously expensive, only a dancer singing outside on the balcony and beaming it into the house is going to cut it (and it is cheaper to cross town and do that, even without getting a meal included).
High production investment, with a hard-working cast of 12, but they clearly won the script in a bad poker hand. Without a real star, the justification of the entire event is in question.
A proper cabaret room, more inventive choreography with the space to let it happen – all would help. A mixture of rather good and far too gloopy, a lot of sifting is required if there is any gold to be found in this none too wild West End event.
2 stars.
Photo credit: Todaytix. Used by permission.