Finucane and Smith: Glory Box review – this burlesque doesn’t play nice
An aging man – the kind of slightly worn-out rocker in jeans and leather jacket you might see in a music pub – strips to the sounds of Divinyls’ I Touch Myself, until his bare breasts reveal that we have been watching a woman all along. A disco diva in a dress decorated with sparkling pink breasts and vagina, belts out a song about a cat with nine lives, drawing parallels with something else. A hoolahooper gets increasingly frantic throughout her act, dragging on a cigarette through the hoops. The sensuous act of a glamorous performer degenerates into an orgy of ordinary kitchen items. This burlesque does not play nice.
Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, partners in life and work, have become almost synonymous with burlesque in Melbourne. Glory Box is the latest incarnation of their regular show The Burlesque Hour, which started in 2004, and has by now toured the world, collecting awards and converting audiences. Drawing around them a cast of talented artists, and crafting individual acts into an edgy, subversive program, Finucane and Smith have infused burlesque with performance art, horror, and feminism.
The show changes every season, and every night: I caught Yana Alana’s disco bombshell, Lilikoi Kaos’s hoolahooping, dancers Holly Durant and Jessica Wong, acrobat Azaria Universe, and Moira Finucane herself. The acts vary from raw to highly polished; from conceptual to showcases of skill; and from approachable to rather terrifying. Yana Alana is a diva, but a loving, motherly diva. Finucane has managed to instil in me fear of milk, tomato soup and balloons.
Finucane and Smith’s productions have a cumulative, atmospheric effect. It is not just the sum of the performances that one must consider, but the entire world crafted around them, down to the carefully calibrated tone of their marketing material: “Seductive Spectacle! Wild Child Circus! Live Art Exotica!” (One of their past events advertised “Anatomically Correct Erotica!”) The magical, carnivalesque setting of Adelaide’s Garden of Unearthly Delights works perfectly to support the world they are creating: equal parts camp and horror; tongue-in-cheek yet uncompromising.
Glory Box is an uneven and often unpolished show. Many acts are better in concept than in execution. But the total experience is so grotesque, and bizarrely feminist – here is an entirely female cast, switching between sparkly gowns and full frontal nudity, turning their dainty, feminine acts into terrifying, omnipotent monsters – that it is not at all uninteresting to watch.