Christina Aguilera's raunchy Burlesque musical is a cult hit in the making

Telegraph

23-07-2025

Well, this is a surprise. After weeks of rumoured chaos, including alleged rows over nepotism, working conditions and creative decisions – including cast members forced to buy their costumes from Primark and various creatives either fired or replaced and forced to sign NDAs – this knowingly daft riff on the 2010 Christina Aguilera and Cher movie emerges as a strange sort of triumph.
Written by the film's original director and writer Steve Antin – although with a largely new score by Todrick Hall, who has replaced Nick Winston as director for its West End debut following a try out run in Manchester last year – it is so cheerfully itself, so zestily camp and so sharply performed it somehow snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.
It also features an absolute knockout performance from newcomer Jess Folley in the Aguilera role of Ali – the church-going girl from Iowa, who against the odds turns around a struggling Burlesque club in the city.
Granted, Antin fumbles his own plot, although mercifully Hall has responded to reports of audiences staggering out of four-hour previews by cutting the running time to two hours, 45 minutes. Half the story has been jettisoned and new bits added with precious little care for plausibility.
Tess, the owner of a New York burlesque club (played by Cher in the film), is now Ali's unknown birth mother. This means that Ali is grief-stricken over the death of her adoptive mother, discovers she has another and joyfully sets off to the big smoke from rural Iowa to find her – all within the space of about two minutes.
Having seemingly been raised on a diet of corn and church gospel, she is also, bizarrely, an innate burlesque expert, launching into comic send-ups of the other dancers' contemptuous perceptions of her as a rural naif in ways that wittily defy the traditional character arc of an ingénue heroine who learns to discover her true self.
Hall embodies the show's meta-lite theatricality by turning the fact he plays both Tess's queeny right-hand man Sean, and Ali's vodka-swilling gospel teacher Miss Loretta into a running gag. He makes a virtue out of the show's scrappy DNA and madcap, extemporaneous air (there's a good line about Coldplay kiss cams).
Yes, an awful lot of songs in the first act are filler. Yes, we are expected more than once to invest in a roof-scorching power ballad delivered by a character we have only just met. And sometimes it's hard to know if the show is being wink-wink referential or simply derivative – be it in the echoes of Hamilton and Sweet Charity in the relentless genre-hopping score, or the odd visual nod to A Chorus Line and Cabaret.
Yet the buzz is infectious. Folley is formidable as Ali, easily Aguilera's equal as a singer and managing the transition from supposed comic klutz to burlesque vamp with ease. The first act is a victim of its own storyline, parading a succession of standard burlesque routines: the very reason why the club is floundering.
But Act Two, with the help of Aguilera's original stand-out song Show Me How You Burlesque, ramps up the raunch. George Maguire brings relish to the English upper-class comedy villain Vince. There's lovely work from Paul Jacob French as Ali's lazily charming love interest Jackson, and Asha Parker-Wallace finds prima donna Nikki's sharp angles and soft core.
The dancing is pin-sharp, even if the ensemble spend a lot of time showing us their G-string adorned buttocks. There's an irony to a show that spends a lot of time telling us what burlesque is while sacrificing specificity in its determination to generate general cheesy giddy delirium, but who cares? It's a cult hit in the making.