An inside look at the auditions for Magic Mike in the West End
This article from The Sunday Times is not accessble without subscription, but my library has acccess to it. So here you go.
Dry-humping, lap dancing, gyrating - is the objectification of naked men still acceptable?
What do you wear to audition for a live strip show? Style has asked me to infiltrate the castings for Magic Mike Live, an all-male dance extravaganza for which I am, on the face of it, woefully ill-equipped. Still, one Monday morning, I give it a go. Athleisure outfit? Tick. Trimmed facial hair? Tick. Urgent need for validation? Tick. Most of all, though, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time flossing - because that’s what everyone will be looking at, right? The teeth?
Magic Mike was, of course, a hit film in 2012 starring Channing Tatum; it got a sequel in 2015. As far as I could tell, it was all about someone desperate to get out of the seedy world of male stripping, full of conmen and drugs and ropey groupies - not desperate to get in. But never mind. The franchise is now a hit Vegas show, featuring 11 hunky men writhing around for your uncomplicated, unembarrassed pleasure. Due in London this autumn, co-directed and produced by Tatum, it is, apparently, “the modern strip show we deserve”. For now it’s just the karma I deserve.
The plan is for me to creep around the open-call auditions for London on Monday, for those performers who have no agent, then to see the professional dancers, sent by agencies, on Wednesday. After that, shimmering like the Holy Grail, is a “lap-dance workshop”. First, though, I have to warm up in a small room in the famous Pineapple Dance Studios, the dance space in Covent Garden that gave us such icons as Louie Spence. Immediately, the size of my task is apparent: these people can touch their toes.
“Haven’t I seen you at auditions before?” asks Jamie, a boyishly handsome lad from Newquay. Jamie has spent the past few years working for Disney, mostly waving in parades as Prince Charming; now he is looking for something, umm, meatier. He has not done anything like Magic Mike Live before, but isn’t too bothered about getting topless: “Most of my Instagram is that, anyway.” But no, Jamie, you have not seen me at an audition before, though that’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Thank you.
The room slowly fills up with an endearing cross-section of actors, performers, dancers, bodybuilders and “artists”. There are lots of quiffs and tattoos, and weirdly, quite a few who look like Jonathan from Queer Eye. I talk to “Pietro” (real name: Peter), who has a severely landscaped beard and sweet almond eyes, and has come all the way from Hungary. Pietro is polite and softly spoken; he is also an architect with three degrees. I ask him why on earth he would rather do this. He laughs incredulously. “I love girls!”
On a visual level, you actually get the whole panoply of mankind here, although be they blond, dark, ginger, stocky, beardy, laddy or with green-tipped dreads, they all wear those three-striped Adidas trackies, and there’s an unfathomable appetite for cheap plaid. Motivational T-shirts abound: “Low expectations, high hopes”; “I can, I will - end of story”. But really, by this point, I’m just dithering. We are summoned upstairs to dance.
In the large, long studio on Pineapple’s top floor, Alison Faulk, the show’s choreographer and co-director, awaits the talent. (Tatum is not here for proceedings, but looms over everything like a thonged god.) A kind of tiny, focused, copper-toned Kylie, Faulk delivers the spiel. “Our show is so truly for women,” she insists. “You’re adoring them - it’s not them adoring you.”
Magic Mike Live, you see, is all about female empowerment, which might sound puzzling until you realise you’re in a room of men about to humiliate themselves en masse. Perhaps, I think, this is how the patriarchy will finally be taken down - death by a thousand bad twerks.
Then the throbbing beat of Anywhere by the 1990s R&B boyband 112 kicks in. Now I would like to describe the next few seconds for you in detail, but it’s mostly a blur. It’s fear and shame like I have never known. Hidden at the back, I have to face something I’ve always known but have tried to deny: a lifetime spent gyrating against your friend’s fridge on a Saturday night is absolutely no training for being a professional stripper.
The first part of the sequence is actually pretty simple - a set of small hand gestures and tiny pumps - but it turns out I can’t, when push comes to shove, even give you the most basic type of Backstreet Boy. One move completely stumps me, a set of sexy making-box shapes. What’s its name, I ask Faulk later. “Oh no!” she scoffs, in a very “bless” way. “That’s just choreography.”
Soon the boys are rolling around, thumping the floor, peeling off their vests and dusting their crotches suggestively - or, as Faulk puts it, “Hand on your shit! Hand on your shit!” She is actually quite kind and considerate, but she has a list of demands that, to the layman, sound hard to reconcile. “You’re not a dancer! Be a guy! Be a man! Be natural!” They rehearse endlessly, then perform in small groups, where it doesn’t get any less strange. One guy elects to do it in a balaclava.
The idea is that Magic Mike Live will showcase a range of guys with their own individual talents, although this often seems by the by. “Do you know where the singing comes in?” asks a twinkly young actor from York, and I want to hug him. By now it’s Wednesday’s round of auditions, where things are a lot more professional - everyone is hotter, faster, slicker, as befits a room full of West End veterans. Still, the essential requirements remain. “I have this,” says Darko in his Brummie accent, and he lifts up his vest to reveal a rippling, shaved six-pack. His father was a hammer-thrower, and his grandfather was in the Olympics, but he opted for showbiz. “Spiritually, I’m on a whole other journey,” he says. “I thought I’d be an athlete - now I’m taking my clothes off.”
In the age of #MeToo, is this the strip show we deserve? Possibly. On the one hand, once we get to the hallowed lap-dance workshop - the 100 or so candidates whittled down to a delicious 17 - you get to see how much emphasis is placed on making women feel good. Each lady, a very excited-looking guinea pig, is led to her own chair and her own man. They then sit there happily while the blokes are taught to serenade, seduce and comprehensively dry-hump them. I’m sorry to tell you this, but everyone seemed fine - in fact I saw several little hands tug the men a bit closer. If anything, it’s the men who were nervous, auditioning for the roles of their lives. “I could see some of them were shaking,” giggles one woman, after she’s been faux-ravaged for the best part of an hour.
And the men? Every time I talk to one, I start squeaking the dread word “objectification”. But it feels like a foreign language here, like whispering “style” in the House of Commons, or “kindness” on Love Island. The only one of my “friends” to get through is Maxwell, who arrived from Australia three weeks ago. Dazzlingly handsome and dazzlingly assured, he gets through both Monday’s and Wednesday’s rounds at a light canter, and he has no problem with the dynamics at play. “Maybe one day we’ll care about men’s rights, or whatever,” he shrugs, but he hardly seems to believe it. He came to the UK, it turns out, for a girl. Doesn’t she mind him doing this? “No way!” he laughs. “She’s the one who sent in my CV.”
Dry-humping, lap dancing, gyrating - is the objectification of naked men still acceptable?
What do you wear to audition for a live strip show? Style has asked me to infiltrate the castings for Magic Mike Live, an all-male dance extravaganza for which I am, on the face of it, woefully ill-equipped. Still, one Monday morning, I give it a go. Athleisure outfit? Tick. Trimmed facial hair? Tick. Urgent need for validation? Tick. Most of all, though, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time flossing - because that’s what everyone will be looking at, right? The teeth?
Magic Mike was, of course, a hit film in 2012 starring Channing Tatum; it got a sequel in 2015. As far as I could tell, it was all about someone desperate to get out of the seedy world of male stripping, full of conmen and drugs and ropey groupies - not desperate to get in. But never mind. The franchise is now a hit Vegas show, featuring 11 hunky men writhing around for your uncomplicated, unembarrassed pleasure. Due in London this autumn, co-directed and produced by Tatum, it is, apparently, “the modern strip show we deserve”. For now it’s just the karma I deserve.
The plan is for me to creep around the open-call auditions for London on Monday, for those performers who have no agent, then to see the professional dancers, sent by agencies, on Wednesday. After that, shimmering like the Holy Grail, is a “lap-dance workshop”. First, though, I have to warm up in a small room in the famous Pineapple Dance Studios, the dance space in Covent Garden that gave us such icons as Louie Spence. Immediately, the size of my task is apparent: these people can touch their toes.
“Haven’t I seen you at auditions before?” asks Jamie, a boyishly handsome lad from Newquay. Jamie has spent the past few years working for Disney, mostly waving in parades as Prince Charming; now he is looking for something, umm, meatier. He has not done anything like Magic Mike Live before, but isn’t too bothered about getting topless: “Most of my Instagram is that, anyway.” But no, Jamie, you have not seen me at an audition before, though that’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Thank you.
The room slowly fills up with an endearing cross-section of actors, performers, dancers, bodybuilders and “artists”. There are lots of quiffs and tattoos, and weirdly, quite a few who look like Jonathan from Queer Eye. I talk to “Pietro” (real name: Peter), who has a severely landscaped beard and sweet almond eyes, and has come all the way from Hungary. Pietro is polite and softly spoken; he is also an architect with three degrees. I ask him why on earth he would rather do this. He laughs incredulously. “I love girls!”
On a visual level, you actually get the whole panoply of mankind here, although be they blond, dark, ginger, stocky, beardy, laddy or with green-tipped dreads, they all wear those three-striped Adidas trackies, and there’s an unfathomable appetite for cheap plaid. Motivational T-shirts abound: “Low expectations, high hopes”; “I can, I will - end of story”. But really, by this point, I’m just dithering. We are summoned upstairs to dance.
In the large, long studio on Pineapple’s top floor, Alison Faulk, the show’s choreographer and co-director, awaits the talent. (Tatum is not here for proceedings, but looms over everything like a thonged god.) A kind of tiny, focused, copper-toned Kylie, Faulk delivers the spiel. “Our show is so truly for women,” she insists. “You’re adoring them - it’s not them adoring you.”
Magic Mike Live, you see, is all about female empowerment, which might sound puzzling until you realise you’re in a room of men about to humiliate themselves en masse. Perhaps, I think, this is how the patriarchy will finally be taken down - death by a thousand bad twerks.
Then the throbbing beat of Anywhere by the 1990s R&B boyband 112 kicks in. Now I would like to describe the next few seconds for you in detail, but it’s mostly a blur. It’s fear and shame like I have never known. Hidden at the back, I have to face something I’ve always known but have tried to deny: a lifetime spent gyrating against your friend’s fridge on a Saturday night is absolutely no training for being a professional stripper.
The first part of the sequence is actually pretty simple - a set of small hand gestures and tiny pumps - but it turns out I can’t, when push comes to shove, even give you the most basic type of Backstreet Boy. One move completely stumps me, a set of sexy making-box shapes. What’s its name, I ask Faulk later. “Oh no!” she scoffs, in a very “bless” way. “That’s just choreography.”
Soon the boys are rolling around, thumping the floor, peeling off their vests and dusting their crotches suggestively - or, as Faulk puts it, “Hand on your shit! Hand on your shit!” She is actually quite kind and considerate, but she has a list of demands that, to the layman, sound hard to reconcile. “You’re not a dancer! Be a guy! Be a man! Be natural!” They rehearse endlessly, then perform in small groups, where it doesn’t get any less strange. One guy elects to do it in a balaclava.
The idea is that Magic Mike Live will showcase a range of guys with their own individual talents, although this often seems by the by. “Do you know where the singing comes in?” asks a twinkly young actor from York, and I want to hug him. By now it’s Wednesday’s round of auditions, where things are a lot more professional - everyone is hotter, faster, slicker, as befits a room full of West End veterans. Still, the essential requirements remain. “I have this,” says Darko in his Brummie accent, and he lifts up his vest to reveal a rippling, shaved six-pack. His father was a hammer-thrower, and his grandfather was in the Olympics, but he opted for showbiz. “Spiritually, I’m on a whole other journey,” he says. “I thought I’d be an athlete - now I’m taking my clothes off.”
In the age of #MeToo, is this the strip show we deserve? Possibly. On the one hand, once we get to the hallowed lap-dance workshop - the 100 or so candidates whittled down to a delicious 17 - you get to see how much emphasis is placed on making women feel good. Each lady, a very excited-looking guinea pig, is led to her own chair and her own man. They then sit there happily while the blokes are taught to serenade, seduce and comprehensively dry-hump them. I’m sorry to tell you this, but everyone seemed fine - in fact I saw several little hands tug the men a bit closer. If anything, it’s the men who were nervous, auditioning for the roles of their lives. “I could see some of them were shaking,” giggles one woman, after she’s been faux-ravaged for the best part of an hour.
And the men? Every time I talk to one, I start squeaking the dread word “objectification”. But it feels like a foreign language here, like whispering “style” in the House of Commons, or “kindness” on Love Island. The only one of my “friends” to get through is Maxwell, who arrived from Australia three weeks ago. Dazzlingly handsome and dazzlingly assured, he gets through both Monday’s and Wednesday’s rounds at a light canter, and he has no problem with the dynamics at play. “Maybe one day we’ll care about men’s rights, or whatever,” he shrugs, but he hardly seems to believe it. He came to the UK, it turns out, for a girl. Doesn’t she mind him doing this? “No way!” he laughs. “She’s the one who sent in my CV.”