Wasabassco’s The Hellfire Club

Once every few months, Wasabassco hosts a burlesque show where the performers go all the way. We had seen it at the Kraine Theatre in the East Village, but since then the event has moved to the Gemini & Scorpio Loft in Brooklyn and changed slightly to have a dress code and only allow pre-sale ticket entrance, which we assume helps to keep it classy and filled with people who really wanted to be there.

We arrived about fifteen minutes before the show’s start, and there was already gogo action on the stage. Logan Laveau and Puss-N-Boots were bar bunnies on duty, Sapphire Jones walked among the patrons as hospitality, and we spotted both Gigi Bon Bon and photographer Ellen Stagg in attendance.

At 9 sharp, Nasty Canasta bookended her sleazy Nightrain routine inbetween two slivers of classic burlesque music for the parts where she kept her pasties on.

Tiger Bay commanded us to comply with her futuristic permafrost act, dressed in black like a female robocop oozing control with a baseball bat held with those black leather thumbless gloves that sadly were about the only thing that didn’t come off by the end. Her icy death stare dominated the audience throughout, and this act was a definite highlight.

Sydni Deveraux brought back the nineties in a bubblegum school outfit going to the beach, spreading out a bathing towel and putting the cream back in suncream, accentuating her youthful transgressions with “oops,I didn’t mean to do that” looks.

This first triad took us to the break, which ended with Nina La Voix coming out sitting at a table dressed in long lilac feather boa’s (which were hard to avoid stepping on later in the break for some patrons, as it turns out).

Qualms Galore took it back to the seventies with Donna Summer.

Delysia La Chatte took the stage dressed only in a large black sheet, which she, after revealing it all in the opening, expertly used to draw sharply outlined partial views of her body. That is, until she brought out a skull, proceeded to make out with it, and then had it nibble on her breasts before disappearing it between her legs. The act pulled off both funny and erotic at once, and my partner and I both agreed this was the highlight act for the evening for us.

I used the second break to unclog one of only two bathrooms in the loft to speed up the proceedings. After that, Gigi La Femme (who moved out of New York, but was back for the week) performed an act to Dimitri From Paris’s “Une Very Stylish Fille”, which I sadly can’t find on Spotify.

Jenny C’est Quoi usually has acts that go just a little bit more out there, and this time was no exception. We couldn’t really see what happened exactly, but it seemed she slid something between her legs, took out her phone, and handed it to a woman in the audience to play with. We were guessing that the phone controlled the something. A little bit later, she passed the phone to a man on the other side, who gingerly said “Watch out!”. At the end she took out the something and pretended it was a phone as well, talking to an imaginary someone on the other side as she walked off.

The show ended with the traditional unwrapping of Amanda Whip: Amanda takes a seat, and performers one by one come up to remove an article of clothing as suggestively as possible. Gigi made off with a necklace, and Sydni and Qualms came up together, allowing me to settle the burning question of “which of them is taller?” (answer: they both are, as far as I could tell).

And with that, the show was over, the gogo started again, and we mingled with the guests for a bit before buying a Hellfire Club photo book and making our way back to Manhattan to the Slipper Room.