The Hurly Burly Show
Garrick Theatre    Spring 2011

Dancer-impresario Polly Rae has been staging strip shows in Soho clubs and fringe theatres for a few years, and here fulfils her vision of a more mainstream type of stripping, with the emphasis at least as much on the glitz and glamour as the T and A.

The result is not really a West End show, but a fair and entertaining evocation of what you might have seen in the days of big nightclubs like the Hippodrome or Latin Quarter.

One point to make from the start is that you shouldn't come looking for cheap thrills, or stay away out of fear of being morally offended.

The chorus line of Hurly Burly Girlys spend most of the evening wearing more than they probably wear on the beach, and a few moments in G-strings and pasties, while the star as often as not strips down no further than the point at which they began.

And there's also an inescapable element of diminishing returns. Once they've taken off their clothes the first time, there aren't many surprises left; they're just going to get dressed and do it again.

Knowing this, Polly Rae has been wise enough to realise that it's not where you finish, but where you start, and her turns are really more about what goes on before she takes things off.

So we get a Marie Antoinette number, a Japanese parasol dance, a naughty nun, a stern schoolmistress chastising her naughty students, and the like. And in each case it is the song and dance that precede the strip that offer the real fun.

Rae is a good singer and mover, with a kittenish charm and sly sense of ironic distance from what she's doing - imagine a younger, slimmer, sexier Mae West - and you sense that she really doesn't need the stripping. (I can see her in either of the star roles in Chicago, for instance.)

She and director William Baker (veteran of Kylie Minogue arena shows) have created sequences that send up the whole concept of burlesque while celebrating it, like a sensual writhing-on-the-bed version of Michael Jackson's 'Bad' or a 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' that goes the extra step Britney wasn't allowed to.

Polly Rae's self-written 'It's Not About The Tits' is a clever quasi-rap and patter song, her version of 'Love For Sale' is genuinely sexy, and she closes the show with a classic and classy strip tease that Gypsy Rose Lee would applaud.

Ashley Wallen's choreography is never less than adequate and sometimes, as in the faux-Fosse 'Hit Me Baby', first-rate. Some of the wittiest numbers are the short solos given each of the chorus girls to cover the star's costume changes - a bit of fire-eating here, a balloon dance there, a Flashdance salute there.

Opening act Spencer Day is an amiable enough singer, and it is not his fault that his too-obviously-just-filler half-hour has the vaguely depressing feel of a smaller Vegas hotel's lounge at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday.

It's hard to know who to recommend this show to - the tired businessman wanting something classier than a lap dance club, someone nostalgic for Las Vegas glitz, or perhaps just someone less interested in the T&A than in a star with real star quality.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Hurly Burly Show - Garrick 2011