Will Friedwald, Music Critic, Wall Street Jounral and esteemed author reviews Quinn Lemley’s Burlesque to Broadway soon to be released CD which will be the official liner notes. It's one thing - and a very important thing at that - to keep a great tradition alive. It's also one thing to celebrate a long-venerated show business heritage - and remind people that it existed to begin with. But it's something else entirely to take that very same tradition and enhance it and to endow it with something it never had before. That's what Quinn Lemley has done with Burlesque To Broadway: she's made burlesque better than it ever was. Burlesque is closely related to vaudeville, and both are close cousins of what eventually became modern day musical theater. The main difference is that burlesque is much more, shall we say, specific than vaudeville. Vaudeville might involve anything and everything from tightrope walkers to Swiss bell-ringers to some guy who played a musical saw. Burlesque always concerned itself with one overall, over-arching theme - and that was the relationship between the sexes. The Broadway musical, the Hollywood movie, and the Tin Pan Alley song, as they were all developing in the years before the war, tended to be much more "romantic." But Burlesque was never notably sentimental - it always concerned itself with what Preston Sturges famously referred to as "Topic A." Burlesque was always about man-woman relations (and, as the 2013 play The Nance reminds us, sometimes same-sex relations as well) in the most direct, least sentimental way imaginable. Burlesque generally boiled down to two key components: extremely funny men and extremely sexy - but often no less funny - ladies. There was considerable artistry in both of those elements, the star dancers (female) and the featured comics (male) - in fact, burlesque tended to produce superstars long after vaudeville had essentially gone out of business. (Burlesque continued to thrive because, unlike vaudeville, it offered something you couldn't get from the radio or talking pictures.) Burlesque dancing has been the subject of a great deal of intellectual discourse - naval contemplation in more than one sense of the term - from Sartre on downwards. Back in the day, it was also referred to as "The Art of the Strip Tease." Yet it was much more tease than strip - the ladies knew how to hold the interest of a largely male audience by choosing what not to show, and when not to show it. Quinn Lemley brings to burlesque something it rarely if ever had before: great songs and first-class singing. I might point out that there is, in fact, a neo-burlesque movement occurring all over Manhattan and possibly elsewhere - I'm generally the bald guy in the third row - but none of those shows have brought to it what Quinn does in terms of music and song. Note that all the major songs that are about burlesque are never actually from burlesque shows, but from Broadway and Hollywood representations of the form. Rodgers and Hart wrote at least three classic songs inspired by burlesque: "That Terrific Rainbow" and “Zip” from Pal Joey, (which Quinn has

sung elsewhere), "Ten Cents A Dance" (from Simple Simon), and Sweet Charity's "Hey Big Spender" is another classic show tune on the subject. (The latter two actually describe girls in a taxi dance hall rather than a burlesque show, but close enough.) Indeed, even this album is itself a kind of milestone: up to now, burlesque is not the sort of art form that even belonged on any kind of an audio recording; you certainly couldn't capture the magic of the great dancers in a purely aural medium, and the comics' jokes wouldn't be particularly effective in that context. Yet Quinn has now made burlesque into a medium that is as enjoyable on an audible level as much as a visual one. (And I say that knowing full well that Ms. Lemley has considerable to offer in the purely visual department as well.) "Let Me Entertain You" has become a veritable anthem of burlesque, notwithstanding that it was written for Broadway and not actually for burlesque (in Gypsy, it serves as a musical illustration of the transformation from child star to stripper queen, from Shirley Temple clone to Gypsy Rose Lee, in fact). Quinn's rendition is certainly, as she promises, entertaining. She cleverly underscore's the famous line, "I want your spirits to climb," with an ascending modulation, both of which are metaphors for other things that start to rise (and not just the temperature) whenever one of the great burlesque queens went into action. Other songs explore other moods: "The Stripper" is a surprise - who knew that the classic David Rose instrumental actually had lyrics? The song is another anthem that is to the burlesque ballerina what "Swan Lake" is to classical dancers. (Having heard her sing "The Stripper," now I've become determined to hear Quinn sing Rose's other classic instrumental, "Holiday for Strings," yes, there are also words to that one.) "My Heart Belongs To Daddy" had Mary Martin making her Broadway debut in a bathing suit and fur coat in a way that was quite inapposite to both Peter Pan and Maria Von Trapp; Quinn has injected the Cole Porter classic with a shot of Henry Mancini-esque excitement - the song could be called "My Heart Belongs to Peter Gunn." In a similar crime-and-spy vein comes "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," an unused alternate theme from the James Bond movie Thunderball. In songs like these - none more so than "Bang! Bang!" - the drama is heightened even further and the tension between boy and girl becomes a battle of the sexes with rather lethal weapons. It's to Quinn's credit that she makes her point with songs drawn from a wide range of styles and traditions; not just Broadway and Hollywood but different pop genres, like Tom Jones's strutting and defiant "She's a Lady." Likewise, "You Don't Own Me," is regarded by some as a pioneering feminist battle cry. Quinn's treatment of "I Want to Be Evil" is quite possibly the first version that isn't offered in imitation of the song's famous originator, the legendary Eartha Kitt. But as with the late, great Eartha, Quinn uses it as the perfect expression of a femme fatale with a sense of humor about herself, as much innocent as she is "evil." Conversely, the iconic French chanson, "My Man," shows us a very different woman in a very different situation, one who's vulnerable and scarred, a

casualty of this war. Yet "Don't Rain on My Parade" takes us to the opposite extreme, depicting woman who's so full of self-confidence that she can't possibly be real. (And, as Quinn well knows, both represent different sides of the great female comic and torch singer, Fannie Brice, the first being her actual signature song, the second being written to illustrate a moment in her life in the Broadway biography Funny Girl.) "If You've Got It Flaunt It" wasn't written for either a dance hall hostess or a strip tease star, but rather is an ode of empowerment written by Mel Brooks for The Producers in which he encourages every woman to let loose her inner diva. Like "Boom Boom!" it shows us that this tradition not only cuts through virtually every strain of pop music, but, in fact, is alive and well in the 21st Century. In her first number, Quinn Lemley paraphrases the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee in the famous anecdote about how her grandmother schooled her to make an "audience beg for more... and then don't give it to them." Yet as Quinn notes, she loves her audiences far too much to ever reneg on such a serious promise. In the selfsame "Let Me Entertain You" she guarantees us all a "real good time," and like all of her promises, she makes good on it. Yes sir! !