Prepare to Tolerate Seattle Vice, the Cheesecake Factory of Vaudeville
January 29, 2016 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
During the pre-show chaos period that precedes many shows at Triple Door, I glanced upwards and saw a red-lit peep-show box installed above the audience’s heads. Inside the box, Mark Siano, in-character as a 1960s club crooner named Gil Conte, looking a lot like a low-rent Billy Joel, was fake-spanking lingerie-clad go-go dancers and receiving fake spanks in return. Faces all around me were plastered with cheesy, winking grins. I counted four or five newsboy hats. Dancers strutted from table to table, conducting visibly awkward or cartoonishly flirtatious conversations with audience members. Blameless musicians filled the air with surf rock and mambo. Before the show even began, I started to get a sinking feeling that this show wasn’t for me.
But this show has a billboard. This show sold out last weekend, and it’s on its way to selling out both its early and late performances this upcoming weekend. Seattle Vice is clearly what many people want to see. And what’s not to like? I was looking at many beautiful women who were walking around in very little clothing. There was even a token half-naked buff guy, just in case there happened to be any hetero women or gay men in the audience. I was eating a mushroom on a stick. I was drinking a $12 cocktail called “The Sultry Rose.” It tasted like a bunch of syrups. Was I not entertained?
I wasn’t. I was getting a little depressed. I felt as if I were living inside of a theatrical Glamburger™. Everything I was witnessing had been specially designed to Entertain me, to appeal to my desire for food, drink, and sex. At the same time, the show was operating under the pretense that appealing to those basic desires was somehow transgressive, was somehow “naughty”—as if that appeal wasn’t exactly the same one used by [insert any company here] to sell [insert any product here].
Seattle Vice is a fun cultural experience just like The Cheesecake Factory is a decadent dining experience. In reality it’s just an imitation of decadence. It’s a cliche of vaudeville, a burlesque of burlesque. The reproduction that transfers none of the form’s crucial satire.
But already I’m getting way ahead of myself.
Seattle Vice is set in 1965 Seattle at the Embassy. The aforementioned crooner, Gil Conte, is the right-hand man to Frank Colacurcio (Jeff Spaulding), “strip-club magnate” and patriarch of the Colacurcio crime family. Rose Marie Williams (a.k.a. Madame Washington), played by Opal Peachey, basically works as a kind of creative director for the club. She chooses the dancers, figures out programming, and runs the brothel. Over the course of the performance, Conte leads us from the days of the “tolerance policy,” a shadowy system that allowed clubs like Vice’s Embassy to operate brothels so long as cops et al were payed off, to the days we more or less live in now, where strip clubs exist as places to drink expensive Dr. Pepper and watch people get half naked and rub up on your jeans.
According to Triple Door’s website, the Embassy was a vaudeville club that became an adult cinema that was later replaced by the Triple Door. This venue choice makes a lot of sense for Seattle Vice, as it perfectly positions Siano and Peachey, who created the show based on Rick Anderson’s eponymous book, to use the supposedly transgressive and empowering forms of burlesque—and, I guess, lounge singing—to explore the complications of Seattle’s organized crime scene in the very space wherein many of those dramas may have played out.
But this did not happen.
Instead, Vice was content to romanticize the glory days of backroom prostitution, organized crime, and making fun of Tacoma. Though the play emphasizes and glamorizes the Madam’s power, and though the men in the show are depicted as bozos, Colacurcio is the person who holds the most power, who actually controls everything, and the show holds him up as a simple and smart businessman.
Often, a mediocre show will contain its own critique. In this case, the line comes from Gil Conte, who summed up my feelings in a single pun: “Prepare to be tolerated.” If you’ve already got tickets to Seattle Vice, prepare to tolerate it.
