| How do you capture verité in a world of facade? In his latest feature documentary, director Kirby Dick follows the mounting of a new Las Vegas show-from auditions through opening night-to peel the lashes off that spectacle of idealized femininity: the Las Vegas Showgirl. Juxtaposing backstage grit with glossy movie-musical sheen, SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST is a riveting portrait of the people who finance, choreograph and become America's most iconographic sexual objects for 90 minutes, six nights a week. |  |
 | Employing an innovative blend of verite, high-energy dance numbers and home video shot by the cast and crew, the film is a fast-paced, narratively driven rush of hopes, dreams and harsh realities. Dick's multiple rehearsal cameras chronicle the backstage tensions - weigh-ins, company politics, frank girl talk, injuries and firings - while the dancers' cameras focus on a make-up removed home life where kids have to be picked up from school, dad's parole board is coming up and white guys are racist even if they date black women. Through all this, the 12 dancers must stay thin, beautiful, and healthy while learning 15 intricate dance numbers over 25 days, wearing 20 pound headdresses and 4 inch heels. |
| But the real drama plays out among the show's creators. In the glitzkreiged world of the Vegas stage, a maverick showman has returned. Producer Greg Thompson, the P. T. Barnum of regional theater, couldn't interest the big casinos in a topless revue a decade ago when Vegas was selling itself as a family destination. But now, the 'adult' is back in 'America's adult playground,' and Greg has sunk a quarter of a million into opening his new topless revue of the history of showgirls. He turns to his partner, Mistinguett, a 6-foot platinum blonde and the emotional heart of the film. Mistinguett has been Greg's costume designer, choreographer and lover for most of the last 20 years. But 2 years ago, Greg married a woman half his age, Sunny, and made her the star of all his shows. Now Mistinguett must use her art to make her ex-lover's new wife into a crowd-pleasing object of desire. |  |
 | A documentary musical with energy, wit and heart, SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST celebrates the iconography of the female, hanging out with a diverse, athletic and hilariously honest group of working women who put on and quick change 15 barely-there stage-lit costumes of male fantasy every night. But what is glimpsed beyond the shimmering seven veils of colored wigs, feathered headdresses and peak-a-boo cha-cha pants is the warm flesh of love, loss and the miraculous near impossibility of artistic collaboration. |
a CHAIN CAMERA PICTURE
a FILM BY KIRBY DICK
"SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST"
Original Music by BLAKE LEYH
Edited by MATTHEW CLARKE
Associate Producer JANE FITZGERALD
Executive Producer for Chain Camera Pictures KIRBY DICK
Produced by EDDIE SCHMIDT
Directed by KIRBY DICK
Supervising Producer for HBO NANCY ABRAHAM
Executive Producer for HBO SHEILA NEVINS
Read the review in The Hollywood Reporter
© 2004 SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST
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