“Don’t turn around,” says my wife.
“What?”
The music is very loud, not conducive to conversation.
“Don’t turn around!” she says, panicky.
I turn around to see what the problem is and I’m confronted with a dude in a jockstrap whose bare butt is about to hit me in the head.
So, guys, if you take your woman to this show, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Chippendales is a world-famous girls-night-out show meant for women only and the audience is almost all female. The theater seats about 350 (top of head estimate) and I saw only two other men in the crowd. I went with my wife to get the female perspective.
The night I went to review the show may have been a bad night. At the door to the theater, attendees were being asked to sign a waiver, as the show was being filmed, so it wasn’t a typical night.
Much of the show consists of the male dancers bringing female audience members onto the stage for silly skits. One routine is a “game show” where three women compete for a prize. The women have to act out “naughty” fantasies with the MC.
But none of the contestants came off like real women from the audience. I was pretty sure they were shills, acting out scripted performances for the film. The whole show seemed to lack spontaneity and enthusiasm.
A second problem was the sound system, and specifically the MC’s microphone. It was often hard to understand what he was saying. Also, the MC sings on a few of the numbers, and whoever was doing the sound mixing was constantly drowning out his voice with the music. In fact, this was about the worst sound system I’ve ever heard in a Vegas production show.
It occurs to me as I write this that they may have been using a different mic that was being mixed for the film but less-than-ideally for the stage show. He tried a sing-along on “Sweet Home Alabama.” I couldn’t figure out why it was included in the show.
About halfway through the production, my wife asked me if I’d mind if she left. She’d enjoyed Thunder from Down Under, but her view of Chippendales was: “This is awful. I can’t sit through it.”
The dancers were good dancers, hunky dudes with pecs. They do a lot of ripping off of their t-shirts and throwing them into the audience.
There was also some full nudity in the show, though the dancers ware always careful to hold their hands or some prop in front of their dicks when they turned around to face the audience. No full frontal shots.
The theater is comfortable. All seating is in padded chairs at small tables for four. In keeping with the show’s theme, even the cocktail server was a muscle-bound dude. A margarita was $14.
My wife says the problem for her was the lack of spontaneity. While Thunder from Down Under emphasized solo dancers “with lots of personality” (her words), Chippendales features more group choreography, similar to what showgirls do in many topless casino productions. She also liked that the Thunder guys made lots of eye contact with members of the audience.
I can attest to the fact that she was pretty quiet at Chippendales, while she had been screaming and hollering with the best of them at Thunder. So if you’re considering taking your significant other to a Vegas hunk show, I’ll recommend Thunder from Down Under if for no other reason than that the Thunder guys mostly danced on the tables when they came into the audience, so your odds of getting assed in the head are considerably reduced.
