After a glamorous night filled with snowfall, sequins, jazz-ified Tchaikovsky and seductive stripteases, you might not guess that “Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker,” running through Dec. 29 at The Triple Door, was born from feminist rage.
As a young ballerina, dancer and burlesque artist, Lily Verlaine grew up performing and loving “The Nutcracker.” As a university student, one of her main focuses was feminist theory. So when she saw the Kent Stowell-choreographed, Maurice Sendak-designed production of “The Nutcracker” at Pacific Northwest Ballet in the mid-2000s, she adored it — but not all of it.
“So it’s a woman in a cage,” Verlaine said of Arabian Coffee, as the role in question was known in that production. “She’s trotted out, set down, and she dances this beautiful dance. But she tries to escape a couple of times, and there are these humans with flowy pants who stop her every time she tries to leave the stage — I thought it was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen.”
(That Stowell-and-Sendak “Nutcracker” ran at PNB from 1983 until 2014. Starting in 2015, PNB’s “Nutcracker” uses George Balanchine’s 1954 choreography with new costumes and sets by Ian Falconer. For the record, PNB has updated some of “The Nutcracker’s” more socially archaic elements in recent years.)
What if, Verlaine thought, the woman was instead completely in charge of her own environment. And thus was born “The Countess of Coffee,” the first number created for what would become “Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker.”
“The whole idea is she’s stripping down so that she can be bathed in a giant cup of coffee by her attendants who are absolutely not there to cage her,” Verlaine said. “They’re there to assist in her presiding over her own universe.”
When “Sweets” premiered in 2006, “it was grandiose to us at the time, but our original cast was only eight — if you count the piano player and the stage manager,” said Jasper McCann, Verlaine’s longtime collaborator. Together they are the producing duo Verlaine & McCann (stage names both, for Rachel Gourd and Jeffrey McIlvain, respectively).
This year, “Sweets” features a 20-some-person cast backed by a nine-person jazz band, affectionately known as The Nutcracker Nonette. “Now at any one time, there are like 50 people in the room, including all of our support staff, cast, musicians, stage management and all that,” McCann said.
As a producing duo, Verlaine & McCann have been bringing burlesque shows to Seattle stages for nearly 20 years, blending Verlaine’s dance and choreography chops with McCann’s MGM musical-Vegas crooner vibes and jack-of-all-trades creativity.
When it comes to “Sweets,” the two co-conceived, developed, directed and produced the show; artistic direction and choreography are by Verlaine with songs, lyrics and book by McCann — who also collaborated with Kate Olson and Michael Owcharuk on the show’s original jazz arrangements from the Tchaikovsky score. Whew.
After all this time, they know how to work well together. “We met after a show of (fellow Seattle burlesquers) The Atomic Bombshells in I think 2005,” McCann said. “I happened to light her cigarette because that’s when you could smoke in bars, and that’s how it all started.”
There was a boom some 15 years ago when you couldn’t swing a purse without hitting a burlesque show in Seattle, and while the form is still popular, its ubiquity has ebbed. What accounts for Verlaine and McCann’s staying power?
One of their biggest producing secrets is insisting on what both Verlaine and McCann call a “premium experience.” That means top-tier dancers, exquisite sets and costumes, excellent wigs and makeup, and a sense of occasion. Quality control is everything. (Case in point: Another Verlaine & McCann production, “Through the Looking Glass: The Burlesque Alice in Wonderland,” won 2024 Gregory Awards, Seattle’s local theater awards, for both outstanding production — dance/movement and outstanding costume design.)
Another producing secret is “being humble and shameless,” Verlaine said, with a laugh. “I was thinking about all the times I’ve approached people who are so much better than me to please come and participate, and hopefully have a nice enough red carpet to attract them.” Which leads to another V&L producing secret: Treat your people very well.
This year’s talented cast includes “Sweets” first-timer Jett Adore, coming to Seattle straight from Dita Von Teese’s show in Las Vegas; Tadger Sinclair, the burlesque alter ego of former PNB dancer Joshua Grant; and Babette LaFave, who performs a magical number done in silhouette and has been with “Sweets” since its first year.
After many years as the “Sweets” emcee, McCann this year focuses his energies behind the scenes, and Broadway actor Scott Willis fills the role of the show’s tuxedoed host, who sometimes sports an eye patch in a sartorial hint at the dour Herr Drosselmeyer from “The Nutcracker.”
Verlaine no longer dances “The Countess of Coffee,” but she still steals the show as the Snow Queen, Florearina (the lead dancer in the feather fan spectacle) and as the Baroness of Bonbons, a seductive take on the Sugar Plum Fairy.
When presenting a traditional property in an untraditional way, it behooves artists to remain both aesthetically and culturally agile.
Verlaine and McCann were well aware of the culturally appropriative aspects of “The Nutcracker” from the start, and do their best to stay nimble and responsive to the world around them as the years roll by.
“Suddenly the cultural conversation changes, and we’re like, oh, we could do this better,” McCann said.
One of their first and most powerful changes was to the number “The Brothers Baklava,” the “Sweets” spin on “The Nutcracker’s” Russian Dance.
“When it became illegal to be gay in Russia, we were like, we’re going to do that dance through the lens of being queer,” Verlaine said. “We’ve had many different types of humans in those roles — cis males, cis females, trans women, trans men — and in some acts we don’t think about the gender binary at all. But in that act, it’s like, OK, please bring your most authentic self to this because we’re trying to present a world where (being gay) is universally accepted and celebrated.”
Because burlesque is, in so many ways, about celebration. Yes, you’re going to see some flesh, but Verlaine and McCann feel very strongly that nudity isn’t the purview of a male audience; it’s a celebration of individual and personal freedom meant for everyone.
“We want everyone to feel like they’re seeing something that they could take their grandmother to,” Verlaine said. “And people do!”