Las Vegas was a hot location for movies in 1995. Nicolas Cage battled his demons in the character study “Leaving Las Vegas,” with Elisabeth Shue caught in the crossfire. Sharon Stone was a shrewd hustler turned mob wife in the Martin Scorsese drama “Casino.” All three actors landed Oscar nominations (Cage won), and even when certain critics didn’t care for those films, they at least respected them.
That cannot be said of the third major Vegas movie from that year: Paul Verhoeven’s NC-17-rated “Showgirls,” the flashy, brash, somewhat bonkers tale of a dancer named Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) who claws her way to the top of the seminude entertainment heap — or volcano, as the case may be.
And yet it is that film that has inspired a documentary, drag tributes, musical spoofs, memes, academic essays (some of them collected in the recent anthology “The Year’s Work in ‘Showgirls’ Studies,” from Indiana University Press) and even a poetic retelling in sestinas. The latest entry in this ever-evolving galaxy is Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet’s “Showgirl,” a French play with an original techno score that will be performed at N.Y.U. Skirball on Friday and Saturday.
‘It Doesn’t Suck’
Saldana discovered the movie fairly early, catching it on VHS a couple of years after its release. She watched it like most people did around that time: for a laugh.
“As I started doing more and more dance, I realized it’s a cult film in that world, like ‘Flashdance’ or ‘The Red Shoes’ — something else was going on,” Saldana, 45, said in a video interview from France.
“I genuinely love this film,” she added. “Every time I watch it, I discover something new.”
The various takes on “Showgirls” nowadays cover a wide spectrum in which serious-minded dissections counterbalance the midnight-screening crowd’s laughter and the drag satires. The movie is “revered both at the ‘low’ end of pop culture as a hardy cult favorite, and at the ‘high’ end by academics as a critical fetish object,” Adam Nayman wrote in his book “It Doesn’t Suck: ‘Showgirls.’”
“Most films are so cut and dry: you see it and it’s forgettable,” said Jeffrey McHale, who directed the documentary “You Don’t Nomi” (2020), about the enduring pull of Verhoeven’s divisive feature. “‘Showgirls’ sticks with you. Part of the process for me was figuring out why I was drawn to it. I feel like I still haven’t figured it out. So much of what gets wrapped into its allure is the criticism of it and how you view it, what you know, is your take right or wrong.”
At the center of the movie’s appeal are questions that can never be answered to everybody’s satisfaction: What did Verhoeven and the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas actually intend to say? Is the movie inept or shrewd? Ambitious or crass? Exploitative or feminist?
Janet Maslin, whose scathing 1995 review in The New York Times deemed the film “a bare-butted bore,” is still not a fan. In a recent phone conversation, she alluded to a fundamental ambiguity that keeps the debate alive: “Are you seeing this from the point of view of the woman who’s exerting all this sexual power or are you seeing it from the point of view of those who are looking at her as an object?” (Her take: It’s “windbag empowerment,” she said of Eszterhas and Verhoeven’s movie.)
‘Like a long poem’
The P.O.V. issue is central to the production coming to Skirball, in a presentation with L’Alliance New York as part of the Crossing the Line Festival. Unlike, say, Bob and Tobly McSmith’s “Showgirls! The Musical!,” or the video in which John Early, Kate Berlant and Cole Escola recreate the movie’s notorious audition scene, the new show is not satirical, and it is not a re-enactment.
“We thought about my doing the whole thing on my own as a monologue, but it was all too formal and not all that interesting,” said Saldana, whose stage career includes collaborations with the choreographer Boris Charmatz and the director Christophe Honoré.
Then, during the Covid lockdown, a neighbor introduced her to — “this is going to be a cringe reference,” Saldana warned — the R. Kelly musical soap opera “Trapped in the Closet.” She realized that therein lay the key to the narrative structure.
“I had to be in the movie and you’re not sure who’s speaking — if it’s the actress, if it’s me, Marlène, or if it’s from the screenplay,” Saldana said. “I really wanted to talk about what happened to Elizabeth Berkley: What does it mean to be an actress? What does it mean to be an actress who gets naked?”
After that epiphany, she and Drillet ended up writing the play fairly fast. “I would watch the movie and describe what I saw to Jonathan, who wrote it down,” Saldana said. “Then we’d rewrite so it rhymed — almost all of it is in decasyllabic rhyme.”
“We wrote it like a long poem,” Drillet added.
The production, which is performed in French with supertitles and includes nudity, features several numbers written with the musician and D.J. Rebeka Warrior (nee Julia Lanoë). Among the catchiest is “Verssasse”, which alludes to the way Nomi mispronounces Versace, and is one of several instances in which her striving character gets social codes wrong. “It’s a key moment in the movie, plus I also come from a popular milieu and my music is pretty popular,” Warrior said in a video interview, referring to her more populist appeal. But, she pointed out, everything can be appropriated. “Blue-collar folks are always hijacked by fashion — people from Balenciaga congratulated me for doing a song about Versace!” (You can buy merchandise bearing the word “Versayce” on Berkley’s website.)
“Showgirls” is both the production’s organizing principle and a springboard for reflections on women’s agency and the mutability of the relationship between morals and art. The play deals, for example, with how we look at problematic artists and movies, and includes very funny, seemingly off-the-cuff digressions about Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” thus connecting “Showgirls” to bigger debates roiling the culture.
“We didn’t want to act as if we’re superior to the movie,” Saldana said. “The point isn’t what we think about it. Above all, we wanted to talk about cinema.”
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