There's more to burlesque than nubile nymphets in scanty undies, though the eye-candy element is the most familiar component of its presentation. An evening of comme-il-faut burlesque begins with variety acts, usually with a risqué slant, as a prelude to a feature-length spoof of high-brow entertainment - opera, ballet, the Theatah - likewise engineered for good, clean, ribald fun.
The first in this production by The Mill is supplied by Shannon Latimer and Stephanie Sherline's vaudeville patter and 1920s-homage songs - the bubbly "Pillow Fight ( Two Girls Just Playing Around )," introducing the major personae, an exuberant "Venice Is For Lovers" establishing our locale, and the sweetly torchy, "Be My Lieutenant" ("Keep me safe and warm/You know how I love a man in uniform") , which acquaints us with the relationships in the "burletta" provided by Paula Vogel's 1979 diatribe titled Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief.
Vogel's misanthropic inversion of Shakespeare's classic drama - in which Desdemona does the naughty at Bianca's brothel and Emilia saves up for her happy widowhood - can be a showcase for performers, as in the 1995 Heliotrope production. It can be a vehicle for strident hyper-feminist propaganda, as in the Thunder Road production in 1996, or a sensitive exploration of cloistered feminine subcultures, as TriArts interpreted it in 2000. But The Mill (fka Experimental Theatre Chicago) is the first to hold a burlycue lens up to a text sour enough, if taken seriously, to give Florence King the pip.
And what a relief it is that they do! After the initial wink-and-giggle tone puts us in the mood for frivolity, the comedic timing imposed on the dialogue render the cat-pissy commentary - Othello's stingy, Iago's got a small dick, Lodovico's a libertine - no more odious than a bevy of Mean Chicks dissing their adolescent peers. To be sure, we know things that they don't, but our dread of the untimely thwarting of carefully-laid plans doesn't manifest itself until imminent disaster becomes unavoidable (as tragedy always does).
The Mill makes do with its small budget, reproducing its genre's sumptuous furnishings within the stark confines of the Stage Left storefront - red velvet curtains, lacy shimmies, frilly petticoats and music director Sherline and her guitar bravely standing in for the Folies Bergére orchestra. Under Jaclyn Biskup's direction, however, the "Mill Missies" ensemble sparkles with a sunny ebullience that renders its inevitable capitulation to the darkness all the more regrettable.
