“Zombie Burlesque” looks like a Halloween novelty, but it has lasted far longer than most novelty shows should. The production opened in Las Vegas in 2013 and was built around an intentionally absurd premise: it is 1958, zombies and humans have negotiated an uneasy peace, and the undead have opened Club Z to living visitors. The result is part horror spoof, part burlesque, part old-fashioned variety show.
The show has a life inside a very specific Las Vegas mythology. Its fictional year, 1958, falls squarely within the city's atomic-tourism era, when nuclear testing in Nevada became part of Las Vegas spectacle and branding. The show's own mythology leans into that atomic-age atmosphere and explicitly promises homages to horror films of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Another point about this show is not simply that zombies perform burlesque. Its basic architecture is considerably older than its premise. Beneath the horror makeup is a recognizable American variety revue: an emcee, live musicians, dancers, comedy, specialty acts, audience interaction, and a narrative loose enough to accommodate almost anything. Contemporary descriptions from the show's first years emphasized exactly that structure. One 2015 account described a traditional burlesque variety show built around dancing, singing, comedy, aerial performance and contortion, backed by a live band.
That pattern was there from the beginning. When producer David Saxe was assembling the show in 2013, the Las Vegas Review-Journal described a production still taking shape almost in real time. Saxe was combining two then-popular forms, zombies and retro burlesque, while attempting to build something that functioned as a coherent stage revue. The paper compared the process to the low-budget filmmaking ethos of Roger Corman.
Today Zombie Burlesque sits almost unnoticed in a sprawl of retail therapy, where its vaudeville and classic Vegas revue survive under prosthetic wounds, camp dialogue and atomic-age kitsch.
How to get there:
The V Theater is located inside the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. From the Miracle Mile Shops parking garage, enter the mall on the main level and turn right. The theater is in Suite 360, near Flights Restaurant and La Salsa Cantina. The complex is at 3663 Las Vegas Blvd. South.
