THE girl on the billboards was unmistakable. A sexy pouting blonde with pneumatic breasts, come-to-bed eyes and blood-red bee-sting lips.
If anyone was going to attract audiences in to
Milton Keynes Theatre to see
The Stripper it would be this foxy lady.
Lovers of cheap pulp fiction would have immediately found themselves at home in this saucy little tale of a red-light murder set among the smoky clip joints of 1960s California.
It was refreshingly original at a time when many theatres are playing safe by sticking to the tried and tested.
Actor and writer Richard O'Brien, creator of the Rocky Horror Show, is the driving force behind The Stripper and he's taking this baby on the road to only a very limited number of venues to see, in theatre parlance "if it has legs". In other words – will it sell?
It's always dodgy launching a new play or musical. The investment is huge and many producers won't take the plunge unless they know they're going to make a profit.
But The Ambassadors Theatre group, which runs MKT, loves Mr O' Brien and rightly so. He is a national, if somewhat oddball, treasure.
Rocky, which comes back to the city in less than two weeks, has proved a goldmine so they feel he's worth a gamble.
And The Stripper could prove a long-term hit providing it gets the polish to make it a best-seller.
It's a little rough around the edges. Casting is a bit dubious, the dialogue a little weak and the set suffered first-night nerves but they're only minor niggles that could easily be ironed out.
The story is first rate. Based on a trashy novel by cult writer Carter Brown, we're taken to the streets of down-town Pine City where the men are swarthy and the women hot.
Our dubious hero was wise-cracking, hard-drinking, over-sexed detective Al Wheeler (handsome TV star Jonathan Wrather). He looked like he'd just walked off the set of Mad Men and any similarity to that show's anti-hero Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is entirely intentional.
The dapper-clad Wheeler investigates the death of a pretty young brunette and, along the way, plunges into the murky under-world of strip clubs, gangsters and sultry sirens.
It's all very film noir. Think Sam Spade, LA Confidential, or Black Dahlia but with the addition of a sizzling selection of original songs courtesy of experienced theatre composer Richard Hartley and Richard O'Brien.
The actor's witty and inventive lyrics deserve close attention because they're really rather good.
Wrather made a convincing cop, less so a singer, though a solo Many A True Word Said In Bed was a treat. His efforts to thrust his pelvis like The King in Man of Steel was clunky and wooden but the strip was a bonus for the ladies.
Femme Fatale and the eponymous Stripper of the title was a gorgeous blonde called Deadpan Delores who, despite the show's name actually did very little stripping.
No disrespect to leggy lovely Emma-Jayne Appleyard who last raised blood pressures at MKT as Ulla, the sexy Swedish receptionist, in The Producers, but her dancer's figure was too athletic and less upholstered to fully flesh out the part.
The character who caught everyone's eye was Jack Edwards' flower seller, Harvey Stern, whose spectacular voice must surely earn him bigger character roles.
Larger-than-life Stern came to a sticky end but not before making his mark in a show which was, in itself, packed with one eccentric after another.
The most bizarre were the two cameos by Richard O'Brien – firstly as the boss of dating agency and, moments later, in a dress, as a good-time girl.
Let's hope we see a lot more of The Stripper in the future.
The Stripper finishes her routine at Milton Keynes Theatre tomorrow night (Sep 26). Catch the act.
For tickets and information contact the box office 0844 871 7652 or go online www.ambassadortickets.com/miltonkeynes