Behind the Burly Q by Leslie Zemeckis

Author:Leslie Zemeckis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Stripper Ann Corio and much younger husband Mike Iannucci

Mike had never seen a burlesque show. “I came up with the idea—why don’t we do a show depicting the history of burlesque as it was in its finer days?” Mike had trouble convincing investors to put up the money. However, the investors eventually made “a ton of money back. They believed in the show,” he said. Ann hired comics and strippers she had worked with and she was the director. Mike produced. This Was Burlesque debuted on Broadway in 1961.

How did Mike and Ann get burlesque back in New York and on Broadway after LaGuardia had banned it? Mike said, “It wasn’t a law that was legislated. I researched it and did the show. I had no trouble. The censors came by and saw the show.” LaGuardia was long gone by then. “No one else fought the law until I came along.”

Burlesque had changed since Ann’s reign. “It had generated to strictly stripping and the bad type.” When they ran the show, Ann was tough.

“We emphasize comedy,” Ann explained at the time. “We are not offensive.”

Ann would stand backstage and listen. “She’d listen to comics from a speaker in her room and wouldn’t stand for bad words and swearing. She was a flag-waving American,” according to niece Carole Nelson. She was strict and she was known to have a temper that matched her fiery red hair.

Ann put a lot of the comedians back to work that had been unemployed when the strippers bumped them off the stage. “They had almost no work. They loved it when we came along. We gave them steady work doing what they loved to do.” They employed Steve Mills, Dexter Maitland, and Claude Mathis (who was eighty-one in 1981 and still with the show). Most were old men.

This Was Burlesque had a couple strippers (though most shows by then had six or eight), four or five comedians, and two straight men (all but banished from burlesque in the 1960s) and a chorus line. “Later burlesque, they never had a chorus line again,” Mike said.

They put “a little chubby girl out of step in the chorus, next to the tree-toppers. The little chubby girl, it was a comedy relief. We had all different sized girls. They opened show, did two or three numbers, then did a finale parade out with beautiful costumes.”

Carole remembered her aunt cutting costumes on her dining room table and recalled Ann being very motherly towards her. Ann told her she “was the daughter [she] was meant to have.” Carole in fact lives with the suspicion that she might be her “aunt’s” daughter, as so often times happened in those days.

Ann’s strippers were all “clean.” At that time, strippers in New Jersey “could do almost anything.... Ann never took them.” The strippers in Ann’s show had to work according to how Ann wanted it.

Like so many of the strippers told me, Ann never exercised besides dancing in the show. Carole said she had a “great sense of humor and loved animals.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.