‘Magic Mike Live’ covers all the bases
Smooth performance offers music, non-creepy lap dances and a safe word
Here’s something I never expected to say: I got a lap dance from a male stripper, and it wasn’t awkward. For that, I thank Channing Tatum.
The shockingly smooth performance was part of a preview for the Magic Mike star’s new male revue show, Magic Mike Live, which opened Friday at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.
Tatum and co-director Alison Faulk, the choreographer from the film franchise, deliver on the stripping, but not in the outdated, trite way you’re familiar with.
Instead, the new show doesn’t involve Village People outfits, jackhammer gyration, complete nudity and dollar bills. On the contrary, it features dancing, singing, piano playing, drumming, aerial acrobatics and even a
pas de deux in the rain. Women are encouraged to throw pink “you’re welcome” slips in lieu of money at the performers seen in the audience, on the stage, atop the bar and midair.
The 90-minute performance manages to be a strip show with substance. Like a romance novel come to life, it’s a piece of erotic entertainment made for a woman’s gaze.
Magic Mike Live opens with a stereotypical striptease: A guy in fireman’s outfit center stage unleashes a phallic hose on an unsuspecting woman.
But the performance is immediately turned on its head: The woman is a plant, and becomes our host, explaining that “this (guy) isn’t allowed to say the word ‘moist’ ever, and this guy isn’t allowed to spray me with his hose.” Instead, our hostess determines that she — and we as women — can do better than that terrible strip show cliché.
What follows is our introduction to 13 muscular performers. “You’re in great, very large, multicultural hands,” the hostess tells us before giving a role call of everyone from the “not too dirty musician” to a “sensitive British gyno.” And we learn the structure for the stage production: A clueless waiter, called Mike (duh), wants to learn how to please women. The other performers are there to teach him, through lessons in breakdance, hip-hop and a segment to the tune of 50 Cent’s Candy Shop that had a dancer licking whipped cream off a lucky lady. (She seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.)
Each act features plenty of audience participation from some of the 450 or so guests. Women are given foot massages, twirled during slow dances and offered up abs for stroking.
Oh, and there are lap dances. Many lap dances. Some involve twerking (guilty). Others function as part of synchronized dance routines. But the dryhumping doesn’t feel demeaning.
Maybe it’s because every dancer smells so good. Or that the staff is so polite, commenting sincerely on how “beautiful” audience members are and how “lovely” they dance. Or, most likely, the positive experience is set by the empowering tone and support of our female host.
Regardless, I heard no one in the crowd use the safe word, “unicorn.” Instead, there was plenty of cheering for the acrobatic men who strip down to their skivvies — and to the skimpier skivvies under those skivvies.
“We hope you leave here tonight feeling loved,” our hostess said to the crowd of happy drunks.
It may not have been love that birthday girls, bachelorette partiers and tourists felt, but ticket holders left with grins on their faces.
“That was a Christmas miracle,” one woman announced. Christmas in April.