Seattle PI article on our El Gaucho Show:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/411560_burlesque27.html
There's a new feast at El Gaucho -- for your eyes
Blue Moon Cabaret brings burlesque to high-class Seattle steakhouse
By MONICA GUZMAN
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
Christopher Nelson Photography
The Shanghai Pearl, wearing Danial Hellman designs, performs during Blue Moon Cabaret at El Gaucho's Pampas Room.
On a recent Friday evening, not all diners at El Gaucho had to wait for the end of their meal to get their dessert.
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"I would take a deeper breath," Miss Indigo Blue crooned in her corset to a blushing crowd. "But I can't."
The big-eyed, big-wigged dame is one of the city's queens of burlesque, a brand of theatrical entertainment that combines fishnets, sequins and -- gasp! -- pasties in a dolled-up striptease that makes jaws drop as low as the performers' lace panties.
And on Oct. 16, El Gaucho, a Belltown purveyor of a $62 porterhouse and $280 Dom Perignon, became the seductive style's newest, most elegant Seattle host.
"It was scary at first. I was saying to myself: 'Oh God. Don't let this be a disaster,'" said general manager Cooper Mills, who signed Blue and a set of sultry performers for a six-show trial run in the restaurant's downstairs lounge this fall. "Then they did the show. I thought, this is definitely us."
Burlesque rose to popularity in the 1930s, hit its peak in the late '50s and is now in the midst of a nationwide revival that local performers swear is making Seattle swoon.
With shows filling up venues like the Triple Door, the Can-Can, the Pink Door and the Rendezvous, it was perhaps only a matter of time before a high-end restaurant considered the economy and gave it a go.
"The more I've been getting involved with this, the more I realize it's kind of all over," Mills said.
Opening night attendees watched three women unravel three times each to the taste of a four-course meal that included lobster medallions, braised leeks and chocolate ganache. With Blue as the emcee, Inga Ingenue, the Swedish Housewife and the Shanghai Pearl put on a naughty show for so proper a plate.
But while the recession never put El Gaucho in crisis and business has picked up in the last few months, Mills saw more people bring their own wine bottles and wanted to offer something truly different.
"We need to start adding stuff -- create not just activity, but life again," he said. "We're not necessarily reinventing ourselves, but doing something you won't see anywhere else."
The 80 or so people in the dark, velvety lounge -- known as the Pampas Room -- were older than your typical burlesque audience. And dressier. Tickets for tables by the stage sold for $225. The cheapest seats in the house went for $100 -- at the bar.
The audience was also -- despite Blue's start-of-show call to yell "semi-inappropriate comments" at the stage -- relatively tame.
Longtime burlesque fan Paul Philion noticed, and hooted anyway.
"It's the experience of powerful women," he said. "They're confident. Vulnerable, but strong. And I find that alluring."
Certainly there was something arresting in the way Inga Ingenue flashed bits of her body in a fan of lush, pink feathers. The Shanghai Pearl bit off her gloves finger by finger and the Swedish Housewife (as character Ginger!) doused her creamy skin in champagne. Near the back of the lounge, a gray-haired woman watched, rocking to the beat in her seat.
And the Pampas Room, which had recently only seen private parties, got a little hot.
"I've been lusting for that space," Blue said the day before the show. The room is classic, decadent and intimate, and Blue and co-producer Xavier Frost formed a show to match: more uptown, more artful, with almost academic references to early mistresses of the form.
The result was enough to make audience member and fellow burlesque queen Lily Verlaine gush about the acts, the venue and where the style appears to be headed after its fine-dining debut -- up.
"I haven't been this excited about a burlesque show in a long time," she said.
More burlesque shows at El Gaucho are scheduled for Oct. 30, Nov. 6, Nov. 20, Dec. 4 and Dec. 18. More info is here.
