Champagne Showgirls @Air Nightclub
Saturday, January 29, 2022
Champagne Showgirls’ delivers a fast-paced, saucy selection of burlesque, circus, acrobatics, and aerials in A Ménage à Trois. After successful runs of their shows Cabaret Cheek and Risqué Business in 2021 and their award for The Best Cabaret and Variety Show at last year’s Fringe World, the Champagne team delivered another sensational (or rather, sin-sational) show for Perth.
Air Nightclub perfectly complemented the show’s intimate and saucy atmosphere. Sitting up close, lounging at the bar tables, or standing, the audience consistently had a great view of the performers who moved around the space, and it showed in their rambunctious excitement and willing engagement with the MC and ensemble.
MC for the night was Mike Mayhem, a cheeky and wildly provocative personality, adorned in red and with an impressive voice, whose humorous songs and jokes, while sometimes crossing the line into slightly poor taste, were mostly hilarious and set the tone for a night of playful fun and salacious adult entertainment.
The show’s titular inspiration, A Ménage à Trois (an arrangement where a married couple live with one of their lovers) nowadays means a ‘threesome,’ and Mike Mayhem took no time in emphasising this in an opening song filled with euphemisms and clever lyrics.
After a salacious introductory dance by some of the company, to Bad Things, Mike cleared the stage for Danielle, a talented aerialist whose performance, Lust, involved an impressive silks routine featuring dance, contortion, and heart-stopping drops. This segued into a titillating dance where Gigi Go Bang and Pepper Roxx fought over the ensemble’s only male dancer, Nevio, embodying the Ménage à Trois with an envy-themed display of well-choreographed, tango-inspired movement and three-person acrobatics.
After another clever intermission song from Mike Mayhem, Champagne took to the stage as The Floozy tantalising the audience with a feather fan performance, sultrily removing her layers of stunning beaded costuming, before dancing and spinning in a giant champagne glass, finishing the spectacle by popping a bottle of champagne. The first act concluded with Pepper Roxx, whose murderess performance with a pole-silk combination routine definitely left the audience wanting more.
After the intermission, Mike Mayhem returned to read out some audience-proffered ‘dirty secrets’ which, hilariously, included toe sucking incidents and lawn-mowing male neighbours in leopard print g-strings. This got the audience excited and ready for Gigi Go Bang’s performance as The Temptress, an exciting strip tease, culminating in a live fire performance.
Moving into Champagne’s sultry performance in The Break-up, including some of the most impressive lyra work you’re likely to see, and Nevio’s handstand-laden, cupid-themed acrobatics piece, set to Mike Mayhem’s performance of Creep, the show’s acrobatics spotlight was arguably stolen by Danielle, whose pipe cleaner-like flexibility was astounding.
Approaching the finale with a thrilling fire-twirling madness from Pepper Roxx, and a final song from Mike Mayhem featuring Champagne and Gigi Go Bang dressed as fiery cupids, with tiny bows and wings, the show concluded to thundering applause (and much audience disappointment).
For a show that could so easily pander to an exhausted clique of heterosexual male fantasies with the fervency of a 1970s Playboy magazine, the ensemble of A Ménage à Trois instead delivered a show whose self-awareness as an over-the-top, salacious performance perfectly integrated the humorous, with the genuinely sexy, and the tantalising with the absolutely jaw dropping. Add incredible costumes, a range of performance styles, and some gorgeous performers and you have a show that you should absolutely see (and maybe bring a third person along too…)!
BEC WELDON
