Today on the Scroll: Just in time for the Valentine’s Day burlesque barrage, surveying the unlikely cultural influences that make Toronto stripteasers tick.

Burlesque was recently on the mind of Robert Fulford, writing last weekend in the National Post about how “anyone under 40 or so will find it hard to believe there was a time in Toronto when the art of the striptease was regulated with as much care we now give to the recycling of garbage.” What followed was a recycling of Fulford’s reportage from 1966, when a stripper named Justa Dream was challenged by a pasty malfunction on the stage of the Victory Burlesk, on the site of what’s currently a Royal Bank branch at the corner of Dundas and Spadina.

But given how this Valentine’s Day night offers at least four different burlesque shows at downtown venues, it seems the marketplace has caught up to the law. Meanwhile, a Globe and Mail story last December spelled out the doom and gloom in the stripper industry: “High licence fees, a new bylaw and the rise of massage parlours are giving some peeler-bar owners a less-than-happy ending.”

Forbidden Broadway: The Naughty, Naughty Revue took over the Bloor Cinema last Saturday night (Feb. 9), a throwback to the theatre’s origins as a vaudeville house. The event proved to be a showcase for elements of a scene that’s developed over the past decade, an enduring hybrid of the fetish and swing-dancing scenes that's bringing bump back to an art form that became completely concerned with grind.

The 20-plus-act spectacle, organized by dance diva-turned-singing siren Christina Lorr a.k.a. Miss Pynky Love, featured troupes like The Harlettes and The Shamless Dames, along with live music from Big Rude Jake and Blue Mercury Coupe, plus Mysterion the Mind Reader and a ventriloquist and dummy act, Adam & Quincy.

While the four-hour bill — kicking off with opening scenes from the movie Cabaret — was geared to short attention spans, a cinema setting made it a bit challenging to stick around to the finale. Sketch comedy doesn’t tend to translate very well when presented 200 minutes into a program. Nonetheless, one could walk away feeling like an expert on what smaller burlesque stages in this town have to offer.

Most striptease acts referenced a bygone era where distinctions between the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s are blurred, along with a dollop of punk rockabilly, and preponderance of body art. Somewhere in the midst was a tribute to Barbra Streisand performed by one Sauci Calla Hora, which began with a candle-carrying “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” from Yentl, segueing into the theme song from the movie The Main Event, cultural reference points one isn’t likely to find onstage at the Zanzibar Tavern or Brass Rail.

“I think Barbra Streisand is an icon of awkwardness,” explains Adrianna LeBlanc, who usually performs under the Sauci name in the troupe Skin Tight Outta Sight. “She tries a bit too hard to be accepted. So, even if people don’t recognize the movies I’m parodying, they relate to that. I think that’s what I related to as a child when I saw Yentl, and took it seriously.” (LeBlanc caught up to The Main Event later in life, and found it “luridly unwatchable”.)

The creative energy of burlesque appealed to LeBlanc when she joined the Skin Tight troupe in 2002, a welcome juxtaposition from her day job as a social worker. “The ideal has been to create something that’s intellectual yet can turn me on physically, too,” she says. “I’m trying to get a reaction out of people. Today, you see ads on the bus that are more overtly sexual than what I’m doing.”

Sauci Calla Horra’s turns at the Weimar Republic-themed Feb. 14 Voluptuous Panic!!! show at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen W.) will include a routine that came to her in a dream — a reverse striptease set to Kurt Weill’s “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” — and another Jewish act inspired by the movie The Night Porter: “The part in the movie I’m basing it on is quite depressing,” she explains. “So, I’ve decided to go for a comedic twist.”

Miss Mitzy Cream is among the headliners at Love Bomb: Valentine’s Day Debauchery at the Annex Wreck Room (794 Bathurst). She was also part of the Bloor Cinema festivities on Saturday, where her striptease inspiration included Gone With the Wind.

Miss Cream — real name withheld upon request — also has a tattoo of Bettie Page, offering a list of 11 reasons why she got indelibly stamped with the image, and another portrait of a feral catwoman on her other arm. Mitzy, 29, can’t quite place where she first interfaced with this retro inspiration, but the more she learned about the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Clara Bow and Mae West, the more their self-images helped shape her own.

“I wanted to be an actress, a dancer, or a singer but I never knew how to put it forth,” she says. “Burlesque was a way that I could tie together all of those things, and experience my own sexuality as well. I’m also a narcissist, and an exhibitionist, so all those qualities are able to come out on stage. I can walk around in real life like that, too, but I think it would be hard for people to take.”

The pursuit took Miss Mitzi Cream’s Kitten Revue on tour across Canada last fall, with similar plans for Europe later this year, although she’s most appreciative of the hometown crowds who are accustomed to proper burlesque-show protocol.

“Sometimes, in other cities, people don’t know how to react to my act,” she explains. “But it’s gained such momentum here, the audience usually knows when they should yell, or clap or hoot and holler.”

Labeling herself a “contradiction vixen,” Miss Mitzi also volunteers the fact that she’s asexual. “To me, genitalia is a big turn-off,” she says. “I want to turn people on, but that’s different from having actual sex.

“A lot of people don’t understand this orientation — in fact, they think I’m lying. I love the making out, flirting, dating, all of the aspects of romance. It’s the having-sex part that I’m not personally interested in.”

Her influences don’t stop at the 1950s, though, as Miss Mitzy Cream’s most elaborate routine involves being painted with zebra stripes in order to perform an interpretation of the 1985 Lawrence Gowan hit, “(You’re A) Strange Animal.” During the act, she distributes processed cheese slices embedded with the title of the song, whilst licking the audience members.

“I haven’t done the routine regularly because it takes three hours to get the body paint on,” she says. “And it didn’t come off any faster. I scrubbed and scrubbed for days. But it was worth it, because I really love Gowan. How can anyone not?”

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