"Burlesque" Rehashes Yesterday's Musicals and Squanders Its Hottest Asset: Xtina

Related Content

• Why You Should Stop Being Jaded and Watch The Voice
  February 27, 2012
• Marilyn Manson Founding Guitarist Daisy Berkowitz Reflects on the 15th Anniversary of Antichrist Superstar
  October 6, 2011
• Can You Guess the Celebrities Behind the Pumpkins?
  October 31, 2011
• Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis -- Who Else Did Christopher Chaney, Florida's Celebrity Hacker, Spy On?
  March 29, 2012
• The Five Sexiest Food-Related Music Videos
  June 13, 2011

More About

• Christina Aguilera
• Burlesque (Movie)
• Steve Antin
• Celebrity News
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Programmatic by design, Burlesque flattens singer Christina Aguilera's inherent thorny appeal — the persona that's at once obnoxiously "provocative" and sympathetic — by laughably casting her as the 21st-century, torch-signing equivalent of Ruby Keeler in a hodge-podge of Busby Berkeley plots, with none of the Depression-era style or social critique. Aguilera's innocent Ali is a small-town orphan who Greyhounds it from Iowa to Hollywood and ends up at Burlesque, a nightclub run by Tess (Cher). Ali keeps her singing talent to herself while working her way up from waitress to dancer in the club's stage show, consisting of highly gymnastic, quasi-comic lip-synch routines set to standards. Running an unconscionably extended 116 minutes, Burlesque is nearly half over before Aguilera is allowed to be Xtina. The superstar is instead shoehorned into a rehashed backstage musical conceit: Good girl is tempted by bad guy, ultimately resists, becomes a star, finds love, and saves the show. Cabaret is clearly the guiding reference here: Director Steve Antin confines each musical number to the stage, weaving in offstage narrative. What worked as a dialectical tactic in that film, creating ironic tension between the worlds onstage and off-, here feels like a tacit admission from Antin that he doesn't have enough faith in the audience's ability to read story and character development into the song and dance itself. Not that he's working with Kander and Ebb: The film's catchiest tune — treated as a throwaway — is, bizarrely, based on a Marilyn Manson sample.