Saturday Spotlight: Life is a cabaret for Bubalotovich
Call it burlesque, cabaret or speakeasy, but it’s class all the way when Lilli Bubalotovich and the rest of Les Coquettes take to the stage
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‘What does your family think of you taking off your clothes in public?”
Kathryn Romanow, 46, co-founder, choreographer and performer with Toronto’s Les Coquettes cabaret/burlesque troupe, giggles as she ponders the question. Eight years ago, when Les Coquettes debuted, Romanow admits, she danced in tights so unrevealing she could have gone ice-skating in them. But over the years the Ottawa native has gotten so comfortable on stage that it’s now no problem for her to end her fan-dance number in only pasties and a thong.
The University of Guelph zoology grad has come a long way from the environmental-research office job she held until she was 30, when she reevaluated her life following the death of her sister and decided to pursue a dream and enroll in theatre school at Toronto’s Humber College. There she met future collaborator Catherine Skinner, with whom she joined forces in 2004 to launch the Les Coquettes.
“Onstage I love teasing, I love the sell,” admits the married mother of two stepchildren. “Being a dancer I know it’s the neck up that sells. As an actor I really developed that … And the tease, you literally have people in the palm of your hand … You have people who think, ‘When is she going to do what I think she’s going to do?’”
The label “burlesque” is applied to the Coquettes but Romanow and Skinner find other terms more appropriate to describe what they do. The show at their resident Toronto theatre, the Revival, is best described as “cabaret,” Romanow says, and they also have a production they bill as “speakeasy.” Press material describes their stage show, with its 12 performers and a six-piece band, as “cabaret burlesque,” offering a “rousing, sexy, edgy revue of cirque, comedy, song, dance and striptease.”
“We take ourselves seriously, like a theatre company, not a burlesque troupe,” Romanow says. “We’ve moved away from that word because people have this connotation about this word that doesn’t fit what our brand is … It’s a class act and solid talent.”
Besides the regular shows at the Revival, Les Coquettes entertain corporate and charitable clients and are booked for regional shows such as an upcoming New Year’s Eve gig at Brantford’s Sanderson Centre.
Always there is glamour, humour and playfulness. Skinner, 35, serves as the MC under the name La Minouche. Comedy comes from the boyfriend/girlfriend team of The Mohel and Charity Dawn. Then there’s Romanow, performing as the Russian ice princess Lilli Bubalotovich – a tribute to her Ukrainian/German heritage and Marlene Dietrich’s trademark song Lili Marlene, as well to as the actress’s physical endowment.
“Bubalotovich is indicative of what my body has to offer,” she laughs. “I’m the boobs in the show, to be honest, and it’s funny because for some of my girls, it took a lot of years to figure out what my name meant.”
Skinner and Romanow respect the traditions of burlesque and cabaret going back more than a century to the late 19th-century Folies Bergeres in Paris. Female empowerment throughout the ages is a recurring theme, as in one set honouring Rosie the Riveter from World War II.
The striptease itself can express a woman’s power, says Romanow. “Just taking a glove off could be something like, ‘I might do it, I might not. I have the power.’”
In Romanow’s Evil Queen fan dance, there’s a lot more than a glove removed. She enters singing the 1930s Eddie Cantor song Keep Young and Beautiful in a semi-comic voice, and then shields herself with two large ostrich feathers as she sheds her clothing, all the while high-stepping and spinning to the familiar Russian folk song Kalinka. Hoots and cheers from the audience are evidence of its appreciation. Sally Rand would have approved.
In fact, it is not lost on Romanow that performers like Rand were able to fan-dance well into middle age. She intends to keep going “as long as I can.
“I’m 46. I just brought the house down last week doing a fan dance. I had a standing ovation. I think I’m still commanding the audience.
“Because I sing I can do this for quite a while. I look back historically at women who did this into their 70s … they used this gorgeous fan and she never strips out of her dress. There’s no reason why I can’t do that. It comes to the point where no one wants to see me in a bra and underwear.”
But what about family? Her husband of 10 years says she looks better than she did a decade ago and loves the act. Her mother, who was a ballroom dancer, “pretends I don’t dance anymore … My father’s funny because he pretends I never told him but when he found out this summer he was shocked. I don’t think he wants to see his daughter in that way.
“One of my brothers came to my show and he thinks I’m the bomb, hilarious, he’s very proud of me, and I have another brother who’s very Christian and very politely asks me if I still have a dance troupe and I also think he doesn’t really want to know what I do.”
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