La Soiree Union Square Theater
La Soiree is an evening of vaudeville sideshow and circus acts sprinkled with neo-burlesque and comedic musical theater. Set in the historic Union Square Theater La Soiree is high voltage fun, presented in the round, for tourists and New Yorkers alike. The show runs Wednesday through Sunday evenings and will have it’s last NY performance May 11, 2014, tickets range from $30-$180.
La Soiree aims to please a wide audience. They fancy themselves as a “very naughty sexy circus”, though I found the show to be very playful with a dusting of naughty. This is a show for grownups with a push heavily towards audience participation. How far will it go? Just far enough. The threat of naughty relieves the crowd when it doesn’t go too far and succeeds at striking a delicate balance.
The show opens with a rousing disco dancing puppet diva by the duo Cabaret Decadanse. Puppets? Really? Really and they are fabulous and hilarious. A feeling that we are all friends floods the room. A window opens into the puppeteers’ living room where they making this act to make their friends laugh and laugh. This feeling connects all the acts as next we meet Marawa the Amazing, hula hoop virtuoso and cheeky clown. Scotty the Blue Bunny, a 47 year old college educated gay man in a blue sparkly bunny suit and 10 inch heels, bends the evening into dark absurdist comedy and artful commentary. Julie Atlas Muz, neo-burlesque superstar, graces the stage and dances inside her own latex bubble. The British Gents duo dazzles us with their feats of superhuman strength and acrobatic grace, then they grace us with a strip tease. Manchego, the self proclaimed “sexiest man alive” and comic genius does this own strip tease, not to be outdone by the gents. Marcus Monroe, comedian who juggles, is the juggler in the show with a bubbling self-deprecating banter. Gloria Rivard rounds out the evening with a masterful creation of audience participation. She plays a budding thespian who needs a volunteer from the audience who will read lines with her from the most surprising of places. The personality of this show is wonderful.
La Soiree relies on the original work and creativity of its performers and is a place where downtown performers present a cleaner side of their work. It is a place that gives tourists the feeling that they have been let in on something. I attended the show with a friend who was preparing to audition for La Soiree. We considered, what in her delightfully dirty musical repertoire could be clean enough for this show? We chatted with a producer after the performance about this quandary, he replied, “How blue could it be? As long as it’s not full frontal nudity, we can do it.” It was clear this producer had no idea “how blue” things can get while keeping all of one’s clothes on.
In the continuum of performance ranging from outsider art, created through a necessity of expression to insider art, precisely calculated entertainment for mass consumption, I couldn’t help but wonder where La Soiree falls. Of course there are many dimensions to this continuum, countless data points reaching in infinite directions taking into consideration all varieties of intention, audience, and marketability. For the sake of this review lets consider a simple spectrum that places the pure expression of outsider art in the ultraviolet and the most polished insider art in the infrared. What happens when outsider artists make art for the richer masses? Do they become more blue when trying to make art that is closer to red? Perhaps just beyond the middle of the spectrum among the yellow, a hint of blue puts La Soiree into the greens.
By Greta Jane Pedersen