The art of seduction can be a bit … cheeky. Just ask Audrey Deluxe, creator of the saucy striptease game show Burlesque Bingo, running monthly at the Mint Tavern.
“You do have to be sexy, but also with comedic wit,” says Deluxe, who has been performing for more than 20 years. “I think there’s really nothing sexier than being funny.”
A burlesque bombshell from New Orleans, Deluxe has traveled up and down the West Coast with her raucous and over-the-top bingo night. Each year, she also runs the substantive burlesque showcases at Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend, past installments of which have featured charismatic hosts like filmmaker John Waters, local burlesque performer Cora Vette and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, portrayed by famed actress Cassandra Peterson.
“Viva Las Vegas has become such a lifestyle event. What started as just a rockabilly music festival now encompasses the whole vintage lifestyle,” she says. “My type of burlesque definitely fits into that, and the people who come to the event, that’s the kind of burlesque they want to see.”
You started doing burlesque back in 1999. How did you get introduced to it? I had a friend in a burlesque troupe called the Shim Shamettes in New Orleans, and she decided to start a troupe called the New Orleans Dolls. She asked me to join it because I was a theater major, but I was like, ‘Oh no, I want to be a serious actress.’ She said ‘You don’t have to fully strip; just give it a shot and see what you think.’ So I spent the whole weekend researching all my favorite midcentury sex symbols and bombshells and movie stars. I caught up on all my musicals. And I put together probably the silliest routine of what I thought was burlesque at the time. She hired me.
Did wanting to become an actress help inform your performance at all? I definitely think so. My stage persona is Audrey Deluxe, and it is definitely a character. It’s not my everyday personality or lifestyle. I feel like a soap opera actress. I’ve been playing the same character for 20 years now. I would never have ever been able to get up there as me doing it.
Walk us through Burlesque Bingo. Is it as literal as it sounds? We have an old-style game show set, and I have my Lucky Charms, who are like my Vanna Whites, and the audience is playing bingo along with us. I have beautiful burlesque dancers come out, and they dance all over a board that’s on the floor. As they take off their clothes, they land on numbers. I call the numbers out, the Lucky Charms will mark the board and, when someone gets five in a row on their bingo card, they yell bingo. The audience is really as much a part of the show as we are. It’s a very interactive burlesque show. I love burlesque, but I don’t always love the presentation of it. I wanted to do a new take on it.
What’s one of the wildest things you’ve seen at a show? We’ll usually have someone from the audience who will look like a very mild-mannered lady, and she’ll come up onstage and somehow end up taking off her clothes (laughs). At our last show at the Mint, the power went out, and we have a giant, light-up bingo set, which was dark. But luckily, there was someone in the audience who was a spiritualist, so she ended up talking to the ghosts in the room. When you let the audience get up there and they’ve been drinking a little bit, you never know what they’ll do. Sometimes, they put on the better show.
You’ve brought Burlesque Bingo to other cities. What made Las Vegas the right fit? I feel like people here want to come out, they want to have fun, they want to be entertained, whereas sometimes you’ll have a jaded audience [somewhere else] and they’re too cool for going all in. Vegas always goes all in.
What makes a burlesque show great to you? I want a highly curated show. I don’t just want one act, another act and another act. I want them to all look like they belong in the same show. I want performers who are dynamic and really grab an audience. My emcee has to be hilarious, work fast and pay attention to the audience. I love having people in the show who aren’t just showing up and doing their act that they have rehearsed over and over. They’re also looking at the audience and saying, what do they want from me? What can I give them?
How are you experimenting with burlesque at Viva this year? In the past, we’ve presented it as a showcase where we have an act, an emcee, an act, an emcee … but this time, we’re trying a very ambitious approach. It’s a start-to-finish show that hopefully might remind you of something that would have been on the Las Vegas Strip in the ’60s. It’s multimedia. We’ve incorporated videos with our music and some of the best burlesque you’ve ever seen, with a really funny emcee.
What else should people know about your Mint residency? This month, I’m bringing a brand-new show called Peak-a-View. It’s a naughty little show. It was my pandemic project with my best friend and dance partner. We were under lockdown and had no way of performing, so we created six episodes of Peek-a-View. They were black and white, old Bettie Page-style videos that had funny little skits and then stripteases. Every episode starts with a cocktail of the month, where we demonstrate how to make one of our favorite cocktails. And we’re doing it live for the first time in Vegas. It’s a ’60s TV variety show meets cocktail party meets peep show.
BURLESQUE BINGO Next shows: April 22, 9 p.m., the Mint; April 26-30, Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend, the Orleans; burlesquebingo.com.
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