If you’re a big fan of burlesque and can take or leave acting and narrative then you will love Diamonds & Dust, an impressive-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing series of cabaret setpieces, strung together with a creaky yarn about a lady gambler as embodied by Faye from Steps.
I’m going to be honest and say that burlesque is not really my thing. On the one hand I fully get that the performers here – foremost among them kittenish ’90s legend Dita von Teese, who barely appears to have aged – are incredibly talented, and that their bodies and costumes are all part of an exquisitely honed athletic, artistic and to a degree comedic act. It’s not just posh stripping! I know that!!
On the other hand it is a bit like watching a series of skits that uniformly end the same way – she’s taking her top off but… she’s wearing nipple tassels!!
Of course if you’re into burlesque this is fine, and me complaining about this would be akin to somebody moaning to me that they always talk funny in Shakespeare plays.
What complicates matters is that Diamonds & Dust – which is the brainchild of performer and director Tosca Rivola – isn’t just an evening of burlesque. Staged in the agreeably dramatic confines of the Emerald Theatre (as far as I can tell is just a reskinned version of the Proud Embankment cabaret club), the show is billed as ‘London’s newest theatrical production’ and certainly there is an arch but considerable dramatic dimension to it.
There is a plot, and it revolves around Faye ‘from Steps’ Tozer adopting the persona of breathy voiced Wild West hustler Miss Kitty LeRoy. She tells us about her eventful life playing cards, getting into ill-advised marriages and occasionally shooting people. Okay, it’s mostly just a narrative device to string the burlesque bits together. But there’s also quite a lot of it. And I’m sorry to say Tozer is bad. The evening could do with a charismatic emcee to hold it together. But that is not Tozer. She has a decent enough Midwest twang and is an okay singer. But as an actor she’s stiff as a post and despite her pop-star credentials it feels like she’s being forced into an entertainer role that’s outside her comfort zone. She’s not great at crowd work, she doesn’t have any burlesque skills herself, and she’s generally rizz deficient.
In her nominal guise as Lady Luck, the elegant Von Teese is deployed sparingly but I’d imagine the audience expects that and she is clearly the big draw here. So while Tozer is modestly famous, her casting seems extra to the show’s success, unless perhaps she’s there as a sop to the hen-do crowd. A more gifted actor or simply a good, charismatic American cabaret performer could really have made something of the part - it would have made the evening pop vastly more conceptually.
If you want to see Dita von Teese take her clothes off very stylishly while reclining on a pink velvet bull-sofa thing, you’ll come away satisfied. Dramatically, though, it’s lousy – and could have been so much better.
