Blaque Showgirls (Griffin) ★★★

Written by Nakkiah Lui. Griffin Theatre Company. 4 Sep – 21 Oct, 2023.

Blaque Showgirls is both a daft comedy and a commentary on the status of indigenous Australian lives. Terrible and terrific at the same time, it has the energy of a Christmas panto fueled with bags of cocaine – to be honest, I loved and hated it in equal measure.

Fair-skinned Sarah Jane Jones (Stephanie Somerville) knows she is a proud Aboriginal woman, despite what everyone around her says. Her only clues about her mother come from a single photograph of her smiling in front of the billboard for ‘Blaque Showgirls’, a burlesque show whose selling point is its all-black cast. Sarah is convinced her mother was a showgirl and she intends to follow in her footsteps. Her nips may be too pink, and her hair too fair, but she won’t let narrow-minded racism hold her back… 

Very loosely inspired by the cinematic, trashy classic Showgirls, Blaque Showgirls is a story of ambition, delusion and the way Australian society treats Aboriginal culture and people. Its style is broad, crass and loud, but its message goes much deeper. Everything I loved about the show comes from playwright Nakkiah Lui’s script. It’s both pun-erific and sharp as a knife in places. It’s a smart script pretending to be dumb. 

The performances and direction however don’t manage to hit the high/low balance of the text. One-note and shouty, the show rarely goes much further than its campy surface. This is all glitter and tits. Which isn’t to say it’s not wonderfully fun, just that the fun is completely two-dimensional and wears thin after the deliberately stupid dialogue has been hurled at you at full volume for 85 minutes

The highlights of the show come from those rare moments when the comedy is balanced with meatier content. When Molly (Angeline Penrith) drops the accent and delivers a monologue to the audience, it hits home. Not every attempt at seriousness works as well. Things turn didactic at the end as the thin pretence is dropped. It felt unnecessary and heavy handed for a play filled with such a lightness of being.

Blaque Showgirls is a good time out, filled with laughs and some important messages. While the execution didn’t work for me, it has for many, and I can’t deny the show is entertaining.