Femme Fatales Get Away With It All in Death at the Cabaret

The file said “Case Closed,” but nothing’s ever that easy in this line of work. Three years ago, the mystery of the Death at the Cabaret had it all – intrigue, red herrings, murder, silks, poles, and more femme fatales than you could shake a pasty at.

But it was all wrapped up a little too neat. Time to re-open the investigation with Death at the Cabaret Vol. 2: The Black Widows, the latest show from soFly Social. But don’t let the dancing, the ecdysiasm, the spinning pole work, and the high-flying silks fool ya – there’s a new mystery to be solved.

Luckily, studio co-founder and instructor Joannie Wu is ready to spill the beans and boy, does she have a story to tell. She calls the first show a noir-tinged extravaganza of murder and motion about Pepper Powell, star of the Kiss Kiss Cabaret who’s dead by the end of the first number. It was a whodunnit, she says, “and throughout the show you see potential suspects, and as she’s getting closer to finding out who did it there are more people getting killed.” Finally the finger was pointed at the stagehand, “who was hiding in plain sight the whole time.”

It was a night of scintillating thrills with a body count, but Wu’s not going to be the patsy for this. Yeah, she wrote it, she says, and it was all coming from a well-meaning place. “The intention was to bring pole, aerial, and burlesque out of a variety show format and more into an end-to-end storyline,” Wu says, “and if you’re in the front row you’re part of the experience.”

It was all co-founder Callie Langford’s idea, Wu protests. Yeah, it’s always the business partner.

But Langford’s not taking the fall. “I feel like she’s giving me credit for something that I don’t remember at all,“ she says, but she’s not fooling anyone. Finally, she cracks. It was 2017, and she came up with a number inspired by classic musical Cabaret for the Pole Theatre USA competition. “We changed the music and we did our own Emcee open, so maybe she is thinking of that moment, that maybe it inspired her to start playing in this sexy, vintage-y, noir world.”

But that was just a single routine and not the big scheme that Wu was pulling off. “Joanie always does a show that has a story,” Langford says. “There’s comedy and there’s drama in each of them, and it’s nice to have a moment of humor, and a moment of tragedy, and it’s not just sexy sexy sexy.”

Seems like Wu was always going to get into this kind of trouble. “I was always a big fan of noir,” she confesses. “Especially campy noir, and we loved the aesthetics of classic burlesque and the jazz era. I was super-inspired by Cabaret, of course, and old Batman, old Dick Tracy, and those [kinds] of comic books. I was like, ‘How do we do that [and] put poles and aerial in it?’”

And now the case is reopening with Vol. 2. The stagehand is now the Emcee, and the aging starlet who she’d tried to pin it all on the first time around is back in the picture after a hung jury let her slip from the slammer. “She’s out for revenge,” Wu says, “but she doesn’t care about being falsely accused or losing her role at the Kiss Kiss. She has grander ambitions, and it’s basically to take over the city.”

Bigger ambitions mean a bigger show and a bigger body count, and Wu’s getting the whole gang together for the big night, with an ensemble of 48 including the stagehands. They’ll be part of the action, dressed as newsies: After all, the age of noir was the age of the newspaper, and the audience will be getting clues, tips, and big breaks from their daily broadsheet. “The playbill itself is a newspaper with Easter eggs and stories,” Wu says.

And a bigger show means bigger numbers, and the scale of The Black Widows would make Al Capone think twice about messing with them. Langford’s back causing trouble with a gigantic number featuring 20 dancers, but it started so much smaller, as a scene about three characters trying to avoid each other on a train. 

“I’ve never done anything like this,” Langford says, playing all innocent all of a sudden. Yeah, tell it to the judge, sister. She’d been watching newsreels of dancers on the New York subway, using the handles to perform acrobatics, and saw how she could pull the same tricks with poles. She still needed a soundtrack, and Langford suddenly got the song “Nothing Is Safe” by experimental hip-hop group clipping. on the brain. 

“Joannie needed a train scene, she needed the characters to be interacting, and I thought of that song, and I was like, ‘What if this train gets more and more hostile as it goes along? It starts as just a bunch of bored riders, but then there’s tension in the city, and the detective starts to realize that there’s something going on.’” She laughs. “It works for a world of murderesses.”

For Wu, it’s a sign that everyone is on the act. “I gave her a simple prompt, she took that prompt, and she realized it, and that’s been one of the most amazing parts of volumes 1 and 2 – giving people the framework and the prompt and the intent, and seeing their take on it, which we combine together into that full narrative.”

 soFly Social presents Death at the Cabaret Vol. 2: The Black Widows, Oct. 18 at the Rollins Studio Theatre. Tickets and info at thelongcenter.org.

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