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2 days ago
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If anything needs its own word, surely it’s the ceremonial practice of opening a champagne bottle with a sabre. Happily the term exists, and this slick cabaret is named for it: Sabrage. Created by sometime Madonna collaborator Scott Maidment, it unites circus skills, comedy, lip-syncing and song into the kind of package that can nowadays be peddled for more than £60 a pop. For all that it continues to trade on its transgressive origins – the fishnets, the heaving flesh – cabaret burlesque is one of the most corporate artforms going.
With a plucky eight-strong company throwing themselves joyfully at the material, Sabrage is a fine example of its genre. Group bookings up for a laugh, and a gasp, won’t be disappointed. The two-hour show is hosted by double act Remi Martin and Spencer Novich, the one a sexy Frenchman performing Piaf tracks with his penis, the other a bendy American whose Lee Evans-alike physical comedy, scored to a mixtape of pop-culture soundbites and loud tunes, is a highlight.
There’s some filler. Martin’s routine catching grapes in his mouth doesn’t wholly merit the wild cheers of the first-night crowd – but then, tonight’s crowd can’t see a corset unbuttoned without seemingly losing their minds. Elsewhere, an audience member is invited on stage (please, no!) to mime wanking to a classical music soundtrack. The participation doesn’t end there: the audience are squirted with water, showered with feathers as part of a saucy pillow fight, and have their champagne flutes filled by an airborne acrobat.
That’s all good unclean fun to submit to, as is the tightly choreographed bumping, grinding and stripteasing, lit and scored with booming basslines more redolent of MTV than the Kit Kat Club. Sometimes the skill and the cliched sexiness pull in different directions, as when juggler Emma Phillips spins parasols and wooden tables in the air with only her frantic tootsies – extraordinary feat/feet, but at odds with the sultry stylings all around it. Flynn Miller and Kimberley Bargenquast’s erotic trapeze act is more on-brand. I can’t promise Sabrage will pop your cork – but it’s a very easy show to enjoy.
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At Lafayette, London, until 6 July
