The Yard Dogs Road Show is onstage, and I'm terribly bored. They're a rock-and-roll band and traveling circus from San Francisco playing the classy Triple Door (216 Union St), but their music is unexceptional and—save for a few criticism-proof entertainments such as sword swallowing, sleight of hand, and fire-eating—they seem like an average band that decided to turn their stage show into a Tom Waits video. The dullest part is the burlesque: Three women appear in scanty costumes, lazily shake their asses, and leave. It's not that I'm bored by nearly naked women; it's just that the burlesque that happens on a weekly basis in Seattle is miles ahead of the Yard Dogs.
Our burlesque scene has transformed from a fad into an institution, and Seattle's performers have style—they know that good burlesque is a full-on variety show; just having a va-va-va-voom figure isn't enough.
The Castaways, the house dance troupe at Can Can (94 Pike St), perform several times a week. They're a mix of barely clothed men and women who cavort all over the tiny club, at times hanging from the rafters in a trapeze act that swings wildly over the heads of the crowd. Some of the acts are titillating, but others—a man dressed as a bum staggers across the stage on a walker, strips down to a feathered G-string, and launches himself across tables to peck at patron's heads—are bizarre.
The only complaint about shows at Can Can is that they don't crescendo: For example, last Saturday began with a belly dancer shaking her hips violently as she balanced a sword on her head. The crowd was ecstatic. The same dancer later provided the show's penultimate performance, which was just a hell of a lot of shaking her (admittedly gorgeous) breasts. The final, full-cast dance number was so dull I can't remember it—it's as though they performed their routines in reverse.
The acts at the Pink Door (1919 Post Alley) must be very good. I arrived over an hour early for their Saturday burlesque and was turned away—the house was beyond full, group after group refused entry by a haggard hostess.
Every Thursday night, Noc Noc (1516 Second Ave) hosts the Sinner Saint Burlesque show. The crowd is more lascivious than Can Can's; there are frattish men paging through swinger magazines and skeezy guys with long-lensed cameras trying to arrange private photo shoots. But the dancers are fantastic, and things get about as risqué as the law allows. Standouts include The Shanghai Pearl simulating masturbation by fingering a giant novelty rose that barely covers her crotch, and the shocked look on Ravenna Black's face every time she sheds a piece of clothing.
Dane Ballard, a modern-day Mr. Entertainment, hosts the Sinner Saint Burlesque. In between acts, Ballard tells corny, blue jokes about MySpace and handjobs. He even strips while singing a song called "Here Comes the Snake"—the only performer I've seen who manages to sing and strip at the same time, making him a perfect candidate for a bi-lesque or boylesque troupe.
Ballard also hosts the Heavenly Spies' summer show, Camp Heavenly Spies. Ballard dresses as a camp counselor and plays guitar as he introduces the spies—Agent Rhinestone, James Blonde, and Double Oh Soul. It's some of the best burlesque in town. In an hour and a half, there was a scimitar battle, a shower scene, and a genius take on Spy vs. Spy comic strips, wherein two spies, one in white and one in black, try to blow each other up, and succeed only in stripping off each other's clothes.
The irony of the four major downtown burlesque venues—in addition to the Yard Dogs, the Triple Door also hosts local acts like the Atomic Bombshells—is their close proximity to their shrewdly pragmatic equivalents, the Lusty Lady and Déjà Vu strip clubs. I walk into Déjà Vu to compare modern strippers with their nostalgic counterparts and am immediately confronted with a DVD case featuring a bleached-blond woman with impossibly huge breasts, yanking her vulva open. I walk back out. After watching an incredibly lithe woman mime enthusiastic sex with a coin-operated man at Can Can, I've had too good a time to ruin it with this scientific, calculating display of pudenda. Where's the razzamatazz in that? Where's the talent? For God's sake, where's the show biz? 
