Presented by Loose Canon Arts
@ The Cupola, Garden of Unearthly Delights
TUESDAY 28 Feb 2012 (until March 4)

There are a lot of preconceived ideas about “Burlesque”, particularly with the recent resurgence in Neo-Burlesque, which has certainly skewed the general consensus of what Burlesque actually is. The general picture it seems to conjure up involves corsets, garter belts and either Playboy Bunny cuteness or Suicide Girl rock-show antics. With that in mind I was shocked and surprised by what turned out to be a two-woman, multiple-personality, lesbian cabaret musical act.

Liesel Knieval aka “Hard-Boiled” Lollie P. Jones and her organ-wielding sidekick “Kinky” Leonie deliver a lot of action for two women on a very small stage with nothing but a screen and a few chairs between them. Liesel delivers much more than just playing the sassy, if not a little sleazy detective of the same name, she plays every single character – and trust me, there were a lot – minus a little audience interaction, but we’ll get to that later.

We meet Lollie P. Jones, the seemingly sultry black PVC trench coat clad detective in a seedy bar where she takes on her first case, a tale of Country and Western music and home surgery gone wrong, line-dance battling with bull-dyke backyard surgeons and singing lewd songs about eating in at the “Y” – just make the letter with your first two fingers and you’ll get the idea of how the rest of the songs went.

Lollie P. Jones wasn’t so sultry by now – her trench coat was long gone – and had turned into an amalgam of Humphrey Bogart, Lucille Ball and KK Juggy from Machine Gun Fellatio. My expression of odd fascination turned into an ear-to-ear grin and the same went for just about everyone else in the room, even Liesel’s partner Leonie having trouble keeping both in character and time amidst the maelstrom of personalities coming from that leopard-print leotard clad bombshell owning the stage.

The next part of the show concerned a macabre bake-off involving “feeders” – google that one folks, just not at work – as well as the aforementioned crowd participation, and more schoolboy references to pie than I have ever heard in my life. Lollie dragged up some of the more colourful characters from the stage, including the obligatory drunk hecklers from the back row and conscripted them into playing a motley lineup involving a nun, a jailbird and two somewhat inebriated co-joined German twins for some heavily innuendo-laden interrogation.

I’m not sure what was funnier; watching a man in a nun’s habit awkwardly spank Ms. Jones, the German twins constant drinking and mimed masturbation or the fact that the poor guy dragged up from the front spent the whole time trying to hide the fact that his pants had split down the crotch earlier that night and he didn’t have a chance to go home and change. This, of course, is the best thing about live entertainment, and I’m pretty sure every other show Liesel and Leonie do is as chaotic as this one was.

The final act was as brilliant as the first two, although you might want to watch out if you’re easily offended by racial stereotyping – although really, if you are easily offended by anything much you’d probably have walked off in the first ten minutes! A seedy adventure into the underbelly of Shanghai, Lollie’s final adventure involved monkey-love, hilarious accents and a Kung-Fu Fighting routine that looked like it was going to take out the front row.

As with so many acts, a two-piece often makes the most noise as they compensate for their small number with wild and raucous passion. You can tell that Liesel and Leonie have been at this kind of nonsense together for a long time and love every second of it. I only wish that more “Burlesque” acts could take themselves a little less seriously and put in half as much fun as these ladies do bringing their own loud and lewd brand of sexy back.