The Slipper Room is a New York institution. A House of Variety!
The Slipper Room is facing serious financial difficulties.
I did a wonderful interview with producer James Habacker in 2016. I am posting it here for your viewing. In the meantime, I have put a link below the video to the GoFundMe campaign that is currently set up to help them make it back in one piece! Please Help!
The evening had an edgy feel to it when “Stache Novak” showed up to perform his ‘male strip routine.”
Introduced as the ‘bathroom attendant‘ he quickly removed his pants for the audience’s delight.
And then Laurie Lee Anderson (the winner of Miss Coney Island USA 2020) started her amazing act.
Ridding herself of the dinosaur head she immediately titillated the audience. An audience pleaser for sure she got to her basics real soon. Rockin the house with her jump rope routine Laurie Lee Anderson was wonderful.
Entertaining the audience with her unique looks and style.
Bindlestiff Open Stage Variety RevueHost for Bindlestiff Open Stage Variety Revue and coproducer Keith Nelson starts the show.
Keith opens the show with his very skilled ‘Chinese Yoyo’ act.
Conjuror Nelson Lugo entertained the audience with a wonderful adaptation of classic magic trick.
His magic skills are excellent and telling stories about his dreams got the audience going.
Keith returned in between acts and introduced his top spinning act.
Zero Boy shared some improv with aural acrobatics with the audience.
Utilizing mime skills and storytelling Zero Boy communicates stories to the audience.
Jason Applebaum brought poetry to the Variety Revue.
Keith loves to play with fire in his sideshow act. Here is a plain wooden match which he decides to eat tothe amazement of the audience.
Lou Johnson brought some good ole classic juggling to the show.
Lou Johnson made it a fun act with his ‘amused’ look.
Barbara Gentile and Emily Blue made a beautiful aerial act for the audience.
Stagehand (for the night) (And mighty wonderful performer) Adam Auslander encourages the audience to contribute to the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. A not-for-profit group.
Slight of hand magician Greg Dubin (The Great Dubini) fooled the audience with a great trick.
The audience volunteer watched as the card she is secretly selected rises out of the deck before her eyes.
Lou Johnson juggles with real fencing swords.
Keith Nelson flips an apple and knife into the air and when they come back the knife lands in the apple.
Venatrix performed a wild burlesque act with a red heart filled with liquid.
Keith always surprises the audience with one of his wicked sideshow acts. Here he picks up the yo-yo with a fishhook stuck in his tongue.
Marcela Duarte performed a wonderful dance piece that ended in the air.
Great show with wonderful talented performers. Every first Monday of the month
at Dixon Place – The Bindlestiff Open Stage Variety Revue.
When I was a student at SVA studying Film Production I spent a day walking around the neighborhood and found a film set which had been created on West 26th Street. They had reconstructed an old 1920’s neighborhood to film “The Night They Raided Minsky’s”. I was really taken by the work they did on that block. It made it ‘old’ and remarkably believable. The set even included an elevated train and track. Here is the book the film was based on.
THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S by Rowland Barber (April 14, 1920 – September 5, 2012)
My signed copy of the original hardcover copy. ‘Morton Minsky’!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Text from inside front cover flap.
“Take it Off, Take it Off!
In response to the perennial pleading voice from the rear – here is the book that does it. It takes off the dark curtain that, these 35 years, had shrouded the great American institution of burlesque.
It brings back the days of Minsky Brother’s pleasure palace on New York City’s Lower East Side, where, for three bits, you could feast your eyes on those Risque, Frisque Minsky models; those Union Suit teasers; those Naughty-Night Girls and those 13 Luscious Peaches on an Illuminated Runway of Joy.
It gives you, in short, an uncensored look at the unclad, unblushing Eden that was burlesque in the days when funny men were funnier, girls were girlie-er, and the only G-string in the house was on the Pro-fes-sor’s fiddle. You see the strange extravaganza, eavesdrop on the dressing-room conversations, kibitz the permanent floating pinochle game of the backstage area, case the house as the money is made and lost. You meet one of the most fantastic casts ever assembled between hard covers, includingL:
Mlle. Fifi from Paris, France – she drove a million Frenchmen wild!
Jack Shargel, Jack Shutta, Raymond Paine, Walter Brown, with their hoary, hilarious comedy bits.
Leon Trotsky (in person), who just happened to be around.
Billy Minsky, the Bantam Barnum of Burlesque, who masterminded the whole shebang.
It is a tantalizing, provocative, wildly entertaining. And the sensational, full cast, five-star Grand Finale is reenacted before your very eyes as the Society for the Suppression of Vice picks April 20, 1925, for the historic NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S.
In the book Minsky’s Burlesque, Morton Minsky (with Milt Machlin) wrote, “As for April 20, 1925, the day that the raid on which the book was based took place, it was hardly epochal in the history of burlesque, but it did turn out to be a prelude to much greater troubles… Anyway, the raid story was fun, but the raid itself was simply one of the dozens to which we had become accustomed; certainly no big crisis.”
Minsky’s theater, the National Winter Garden on Houston Street, was raided for the first time in 1917 when Mae Dix absent-mindedly began removing her costume before she reached the wings. When the crowd cheered, Dix returned to the stage and continued removing her clothing to wild applause. Billy Minsky ordered the “accident” repeated every night. This began an endless cycle; to keep their license, the Minskys had to keep their shows clean but to keep drawing customers, they had to be risqué. Whenever they went too far, however, they were raided.
According to Morton Minsky, Mademoiselle Fifi was a woman named Mary Dawson from Pennsylvania. Morton Minsky suggests that Billy Minsky persuaded Dawson to expose her breasts to create a sensation. By 1925, it was permissible for girls in legitimate shows staged by Ziegfeld, George White and Earl Carroll—as well as burlesque — to appear topless as long as they didn’t move (as a “living tableau”). Mademoiselle Fifi stripped to the waist but then moved, triggering the raid. “Although the show, in general, had been tame,” he wrote, “Fifi’s finale and the publicity that soon followed the raid ensured full houses at the soon-to-be-opened [Minsky’s] theater uptown [on 42nd Street].”
In 1975, Dawson, then 85, refuted the legend. “I was never a stripteaser. I never did anything risque.” She said that novelist Rowland Barber “just put all that in the book to make it better.” She wasn’t even at the theater that night. Her father was a policeman and a straitlaced Quaker, although he never came to New York City and never led a raid on one of the Minsky burlesque houses.
For information on the film (Norman Lear, Jason Robarts, Elliot Gould, Britt Ekland, Bert Lahr, Norman Wisdom) go to Wikipedia HERE!
James Habacker is a busy man! When he is not running The Slipper Room or producing shows there he is writing and directing a movie.
Vaudevisuals caught up with performer/producer James Habacker at The Slipper Room last week. He talked about his new feature film that will be released on Oct 15th. “The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man” is directed and produced by James Habacker.
The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man is being released on Friday, October 15th for download worldwide and we’d like you to come along and help us celebrate. We’re holding a press launch party on 10/10 – and we’d love to see you there! Arrive early for complimentary drinks. Please RSVP at press@slipperroom.com
I visited James Habacker on a weekday afternoon at The Slipper Room. We went to the balcony and I set up for this interview.
The Slipper Room is delightfully decorated in a New Orleans/English Music Hall fashion. Quaint and beautiful. Here is James talking about how he started it and where it is now.
For more information go to the wonderful website here.