It’s been hailed as the best burlesque in LA by LA Weekly. Comedy luminaries like Jack Black and Drew Carey have stepped in to host. It has roller-skaters, hula-hoopers and aerial acts mixed in between Mexican lucha libre wrestling matches. How is this show not already a Las Vegas fixture?
Lucha VaVoom finally opens its special 7 Deadly Sins engagement at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay this week after originally planning an April landing on the Strip and revamping the schedule. Additional dates are set for October, and more could be added soon, but it’s difficult to predict how Vegas audiences will respond to something that’s unlike anything that has been on this stage before.
Co-founder Liz Fairbairn—whose résumé includes managing Gwar, so she has “some experience with traveling large, unruly groups of people”—says the closest thing to Lucha in Las Vegas might be Absinthe.
Emma Vauxdevil
“This is like a 20-year dream come true,” she says of the House of Blues shows. Lucha actually came to town years ago as part of the Las Vegas Comedy Festival, but it was a condensed version. “A booker told me it feels like this was made for Vegas, and I think it felt that way all along.”
The show got its start in 2002 when Fairbairn was working as a special effects and costume designer in Mexico and her performer boyfriend introduced her to the offbeat, sexy and violent soap opera that is lucha libre. She was bowled over.
“I thought, my quasi-hipster friends in Silverlake need to see this. I started organizing trips [because] a lot of my friends were either performance artists or musicians and that planted the seed,” she says. “I was also doing costumes for Velvet Hammer burlesque, one of the first burlesque revival shows, and I took the producer of that show to an event.”
The concept came together to incorporate the two elements into one show, maintaining an unexpected dichotomy between hyper-masculine professional wrestling and gay-friendly burlesque and variety performance. In a 2022 piece, The Advocate wrote: “For a show seemingly centered on chi-chis and machismo, its history is surprisingly queer. … The show has featured everything from famous comedian MCs like Margaret Cho and Jeffrey Ross to erotic aerialists like Violet Chachki of Drag Race fame along with other sexy gender-fluid performers. And of course, lots of buff, crazily costumed luchadors putting on a great show—some of whom have also been proudly out members of the LGBTQ community.”
Gael García Bernal plays the titular role in September flick Cassandro, about the life of gay amateur wrestler Saúl Armendáriz, who became one of the most famous exóticos—a luchador performing in drag. The story told in that film is “before Lucha VaVoom,” says Fairbairn, who is friends with Armendáriz but was not involved in the movie. “But yeah, we’re unstraight, open-minded … and the audience appreciates that a lot.”
Lucha has been touring the country and internationally almost as long as it has been around, so the chance to set up shop in Las Vegas brings a different kind of opportunity. And dropping an LA institution in a landmark Vegas venue like the House of Blues feels like a perfect fit.
“It feels like home already,” Fairbairn says. “The only other place that felt like this is the Fillmore in San Francisco. And [Vegas’] is considerably larger than the other House of Blues [venues} I’ve been in. We’re all really looking forward to it.”
LUCHA VAVOOM: 7 DEADLY SINS July 28-29, 7:30 p.m., $20-$100. House of Blues, concerts.livenation.com.
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