Review – Lady Rizo

You might forget it was winter, the way Lady Rizo heats up the stage. Shimmying through the audience in her epic opening number “If I Were Your Woman (I Would Never Stop Loving You)”, she breathlessly alternates each line with a blown kisses or a sassy one-liner. Removing a random gentleman’s glasses with a kiss upon his balding head, she fogs the lenses with her breath, whispering “Ooh, they’re a little dirtier now than they were before.”

After introducing herself, she then slithers into “Ink Dip”, an original song with which she makes a spectacle of removing her gloves that it rivals Rita Hayworth’s scene in the eponymous Gilda. In the very next verse she flirtingly fondles a flower, alternately tickling the petals across her own body and the faces of enraptured audience members. After jumping through several octaves, cheekily showing off her vocal range, Lady Rizo crescendos her chorus, biting off the rose’s petals ala Ozzie Ozbourne with a beheaded bat. Blowing one last kiss, the petals flutter across the faces of the front row. For good measure, she finishes the song by blowing a raspberry to the rest of the gobsmacked audience.

Lady Rizo is delightfully competent in her delivery and deservedly confident in her vocal range; able to sashay from diva to comedienne on the turn of a dime. And her talent as a performer translates into all her stagecraft. When effecting a costume change behind a silhouette screen, for example, Rizo plucks a lucky member of the audience to assist with her zipper. Asked to also recount the loss of his virginity, what follows is a shadow show at once visibly hilarious, undeniably sexy, and strangely sweet. To make a stranger feel right at home, whilst publicly giving him the most erotically awkward moment of his life, is a testament to her skill at achieving intimacy in a crowded room.

We could be trite and describe Lady Rizo as breathtaking, and it would be true if she did not also have us in side-splitting stitches of laughter. Interpreting classics from Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton, and Nine Inch Nails, her performance of each song is as sexy as it is funny. Lady Rizo tells us that she is, at heart, a chanteuse: a classic Cabaret lounge singer in the strictest sense of the words. But this swearing, shining star is far too bright for any lounge bar.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wDaj-Mwa4U&w=400]