Love & Money was given a right royal reception at Downstage on Friday night. It’s a sensuous, sometimes ribald, lively theatrical miscellany of cabaret, striptease, burlesque, comedy, documentary, revue, pop songs, dance, physical theatre, and exciting displays of various skills of contemporary circus.

The cabaret style seating – some of the audience at tables (a feeling of déjà vu of the old Downstage), the rest seated close to the traverse stage – adds to the informality and intimacy of the show as scenes and acts take place about the auditorium in a bath, on a plush red chaise longue, and on a tiny curtained stage at the centre back.

The traverse stage thrusts into the centre of the auditorium on which some remarkable feats take place despite space being taken up by two counterpoised poles on which two performers occasionally and gracefully see-saw through the air.

There are acrobalance acts, acrodance sequences as well as some of the best aerial silk work that I have seen, and an amazing chair balancing act that had the audience spellbound before bursting into an explosion of applause.

There’s a claim in the programme that narrative and character were missing from The Dust Palace’s shows. In an attempt to rectify this Love & Money offers a smidgen of plot, some characterisation and a muddled attempt to give the show depth by concentrating on the moral dilemmas created by a stripper’s job and his or her relationships with clients; all of which is summed by the show’s title.

However, none of this gets in the way of what will be remembered about this off-beat show: a hilarious comic duet performed on the chaise longue in which whipped cream, a banana, and a razor adorn Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman, the aforementioned chair balancing act, and a marvellously funny and brilliantly performed male version of the final dance from the movie Flashdance.

Mike Edward, Eve Gordon, Geof Gilson, Ascia Maybury and Edward Clendon are the highly talented team of The Dust Palace.

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There are not enough adjectives to describe the experience that is Love and Money. Breathtaking, beautiful, funny and poignant come to mind, but somehow words lack the required dimensions. 

Put simply, Dust Palace has created a show that combines their sexy circus/cabaret style with a narrative story about strippers. Characters perform; they come off stage and interact; their relationships are acted out in performance. The transitions are seamless and natural. They take our hearts to the ceiling and drop them to the floor as easily as they wind up and down the aerial silks.

The show sets out to tell the truth about strippers – every line, situation and comment is authentic. Therefore by its very nature it explores the issues of morality and objectification so many of us face in regards to stripping.

Before the show begins, we enter a theatre divided into seating and stage-side tables. Nostalgia for the old days of Downstage’s dinner theatre rushes over me. Then we notice that behind a fringe screen upstage, a bikini-clad woman is gyrating her way through an unimaginative bar-dancing routine. Many eyes are drawn to the movement in much the way they are drawn to a lava lamp. She is an anonymous semi-nude body of no individual importance. The contrast with the rest of the show is the greater for it.

While this show is an ensemble piece from start to finish, the individual performers are all so talented, they deserve individual mention.

Oh my, I am going to sound like the worst fangirl but I cannot help it. Ever since I saw Mike Edwards in The Country Wife at Court Theatre in his lovely “nekkidness”, I have had a yen to revisit the Well Made Man. Yet I had no idea all that amazing musculature supported a circus performer of such grace and power. As stripper Vaughan, his performance is funny, challenging, dark and light as needed, and his relationship with a regular client unfolds a complex life and character. His work on the aerial silks is heart-stoppingly beautiful, and his acrobatic abilities need to be seen to be believed.

Eve Gordon is the heart and soul of the piece. Tiny in stature, she nevertheless has the strength to lift Edwards off the ground. Her main character Paige is the only one who speaks directly to the audience, and she carries the narrative. In poignant irony, Paige’s back story with her man is played out entirely in dance. The scene where they meet long enough to swap pyjamas and bed as she finishes her shift and he goes to work … I am adjective deficient again. As pint-sized tyrant Ronnie, mullet-wearing leader of the male strip revue Man Thunder, Gordon is hilarious. So much talent. 

Geoff Gilson plays Paige’s partner as well as a member of Man Thunder. His scenes with Gordon as they dance/acrobat/pole their way through meeting over coffee, sharing a bed and having to choose between love and money are in themselves an entire show. His solo strip routine I dare not describe lest I give it away but it had the audience clapping and cheering as well as gasping with the more acrobatic moments.

Edward Clendon minces onto the stage as Paris, a female stripper of obnoxious simplicity. He turns tables to play the everyman customer, and eventually performs a solo saturated in both acrobatic prowess and humour.

Last but SO not least, is Ascia Maybury. Keeping both feet on the ground most of the time, she plays Savannah, the stripper with the heart of gold, Vaughan’s regular client and various other roles. Savannah taunts the Wellington audience and bribes us to reveal bits of our bodies for money. Amazingly, she succeeds. With Paige, Savannah performs a hilarious strip routine involving … no, I am not spoiling it by going into details except for two words: kitchen implements.

Fantastic lighting by Michael Craven enhances the performers and performances. It is all we ever ask for in a lighting design and it delivers, which is no easy feat.

Looking around the crowd at Downstage, I am delighted and relieved to see the usual middle-aged theatre goers equally balanced with a cooler, younger set. Perhaps it was that 35 year leap back in time I experienced at the beginning reminding me of my youthful joy at seeing live theatre for the first time, but I feel that we witnessed a piece of Wellington theatre history tonight, as the two worlds of theatre and cabaret came together with such perfect alignment, and somehow creates a better future for both. 

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The Dust Palace has brewed up a volatile concoction with circus acrobatics, contemporary dance and physical theatre shaken into a potent cocktail that is breathtakingly spectacular, sensuously lyrical and often funny.

With Love and Money, the company succeeds in integrating the circus spectacular into a dramatic narrative.

A series of vignettes coalesce into parallel stories about the lives of strippers, and in direct addresses to the audience, the performers frankly discuss the awkwardness of the stripper-client relationship, focusing on how the cash nexus destroys the possibility of genuine intimacy. [More] 

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Be warned that the cast of Love and Money don’t only bear all physically, they bear their souls through this intimate emotional journey. This clever piece of theatre is slickly peppered with cirque-theatre that’s the hallmark of The Dust Palace. 

Having seen Venus Is at Q Loft over a year ago, I was looking forward to seeing how The Dust Palace was going to use TAPAC’s theatre space. And in keeping with the company’s ability to make the audience feel part of the show, Love and Money definitely delivered. Having random furniture scattered around the room meant you never knew which quadrant the cast would appear in throughout the evening – something that really worked and helped to keep the show’s pace. 

Love and Money is a slick selection of burlesque style circus performance with revealing stories about the beautiful, gritty lives of strippers. I particularly liked the range of scenes from a rock-like concert to the intimate bathroom dance. [More] 

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