“The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque” reviewed by Julia W. Rath

Two-and-a-Half Stars  This year my Christmas Eve entertainment consisted of watching the online production of “The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque”, a creation of Subversion Productions. This 90-minute amalgamation of burlesque vignettes by a variety of Chicago entertainers is thinly bound together by an invented tale combining the “Nutcracker Suite” and “The Night Before Christmas.” While largely enjoyable, the video suffers from a lack of professionalism. The content is all over the place, and the show doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Clara is played by Nikki Hartung. She lies in her bed in her pajamas and is clearly excited by the thoughts of watching all sorts of burlesque performers becoming real on one night. Sunny Häelstorm plays Buttcracker, who reads the modified Christmas tale to Clara and magically causes these treasured performers to come alive. Melodies from the original Nutcracker and prerecorded Christmas songs round out the show. “The Buttcracker’s” topliners include: Sio Bart in a sexy red costume; Dotti Moscati in a Hanukkah outfit with a menorah on her head; JoMama, current head of the Chicago Black Drag Council; Otter Chaos, as a brilliantly imagined scary clown singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You”; the Vaudettes/Vaudy, four slinky dancers, each wearing a black mask as a tribute to the pandemic; the Indian-American comic Sonal Aggarwal, talking about the year 2020; and Dawn Xiana Moon, as an Egyptian dancer in one of the best sequences of the show. Other stars are Gaealady and Mason Jiller, Lilly Rascal, Willyum LaBeija, Shaul Guerrero as Miss Nyxson, Muffy Fishbasket, and Glitter Moneyyy. The writer is Jennifer Mohr, and the filmmaker is Geoffrey Zimmerman, with considerable video footage created by the performers themselves. Some vignettes stand out more than others, either because of their engaging content or Christmas tree background—or possible encouragement of alcohol use and suggestive behaviors (however defined).

It’s fun to see how happy Clara becomes in anticipation of a seeing her burlesque heroes. However, the banter between Clara and Buttcracker is often shallow and uninteresting as is most of the poetic license taken with the narrative. More importantly, when each vignette finishes, Clara jumps in an instant from being a wide-eyed preadolescent to a well-informed adult as she and Buttcracker relate some of the history behind these individual performers. While I enjoyed hearing about each of their stage credentials, talents, and past performances, listening to this biographical material detracts from the entertainment value of the current show, which descends into a lengthy infomercial for booking these acts at a later date. In addition, there was far too much emphasis on donations and tips via Venmo or Paypal, with this information being flashed on the screen usually twice during an individual vignette. I do understand that everybody is hurting with the dearth of live productions during COVID; yet to my mind, this was unnecessary. I was grateful, however, to see this information rerun at the end of the stream, together with a short video goodbye from each of the performers. This last part was well done.

Credit for the entire production must go to executive producer and creator Jaq Seifert. However, Seifert should not be the only one responsible for all of the assembly and post-production work plus all the technological aspects in delivering the video to a remote audience. With only one person handling everything, too many things can go wrong—which is exactly what happened the night I was watching online. The show was supposed to start at 7:00 p.m. and was originally intended to be a link on Google Drive. At the last moment, the audience was told that it was taking far too much time to upload the video, so the switch was made to Zoom. Now the show would start an hour later, that is, at 8:00 p.m. Though I was grateful for this “on the fly” workaround, two nagging questions persisted in my mind during that hour-long break: Why wasn’t this upload done days ago? And is this glitch a portent of things to come?

Sadly, once the streaming video began, one could not help but notice several deeper problems that took away from the show’s success. The biggest problem is a lack of focus as to which sequences should be included and which ones should not. More specifically, the underlying Christmas story doesn’t work well when so many vignettes are extraneous to the holiday. It would have been better to cut these out completely and shorten the show. Alternatively, the show could have been divided into two parts: The Christmas theme could have been Part I, while Part II could have had an entirely different theme that might have served better. On a technical level, some portions of the video are jumpy and reminiscent of an old silent movie. The audio is terribly uneven throughout and at times fades in and out as the video jerks. This almost strobe-like effect works okay in small doses, but too much of it smacks of poor production quality. While I do not expect miracles from amateur camerapeople during the COVID pandemic, I expected somewhat more consistency and professionalism in the creation of the component video segments.

All that being said, if you can see past its flaws, “The Buttcracker” has many aspects that are bound to titillate you at this time of year as you pour your glogg or eggnog or vodka into a glass and think “Sweet!”

“The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque” 5th Anniversary Virtual Holiday Variety Show will be available on demand though January 6, 2021. For more information or to buy tickets, please go to: www.subversionproductions.com/tickets.

Regular tickets are $20 each. If you’re watching with your “COVID-circle”, please help cover the costs of production by adding an extra $5 per person viewing with you!

If you experience any problems with the video streaming, you can always send an email to:
info@subversionproductions.com or thebuttcrackerburlesque@gmail.com during the show.

Donations to Subversion Productions are always welcome. Contact: info@subversionproductions.com to find out more.

Note: “The Dark Side of the Boob” (which I reviewed this fall) was an excellent show and, assuming that all the technical glitches have finally been worked out, I can recommend it highly. In the next month or so, it will become available for future viewing on Vimeo through Subversion Productions.

To see what others are saying, visit www.theatreinchicago.com, go to Review Round-Up and click at ” The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque”.