Leg Business
The Blue Room Theatre
Wednesday, September 19 2025
On an unassuming Wednesday evening during spring’s first blush, local producers Delaney Burke and Scarlet Rose brought Leg Business to The Blue Room Theatre, a collection of experimental vignettes loosely connected by the musings of MC Lucy Wong. The material was unapologetic and often confrontational, a jagged, unvarnished storm cloud of pure feminist id that raged against the patriarchy.
Well before the show began, the audience was invited into the venue, staged as a smoke-filled club. Cabaret tables were scattered around a catwalk, with the rest of the seating against the walls, somewhat in the dark. The artists’ dressing area was barely hidden behind gauzy curtains, and a cleaner made their final touches to the room as a saxophonist softly played in the corner, their live performance interwoven with the recorded playlist. An atmosphere and a vibe were established, a gritty back-of-house view of the elements often unseen, yet essential for the rest of the evening to succeed.
Wong began with the briefest history lesson of women in art across the last five hundred years. This ranged from the Madonnas of Renaissance art, through the beginnings of burlesque in the nineteenth century and the anti-pornography crusades of the eighties, all the way to last week, with Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover.
Guest artist Hot Blonde Slvt brought a delightful fan dance to the stage, accompanied by all the expected bump and grind, which was followed by an extended human/fly courtship that playfully combined the detachment of online voyeurism with the body horror of David Cronenberg. It was a mixture unholy yet oddly alluring, one which the audience didn’t know they needed until after it had occurred directly in front of them.
Wong returned to the stage, full of fury for a table of male patrons from her past, who had demonstrated the laziest misogyny, an awful joke designed purely to denigrate any women within earshot. Wong had brushed the comment off in the moment but, with a rapt crowd listening with bated breath to her every word, went into exquisitely ferocious detail about what she would do to such men now.
As that tale unfolded, another performer took to the pole, attired in thigh-high boots and a leotard, their head covered by a shroud, blind and voiceless. The music swelled, discordant and distorted, as the routine moved on. The red lights flickered violently, suggesting David Lynch at his most obtuse, and a giant spider emerged to continue the torture of these pitiful men.
The music, the atmosphere, and the performance all came together in a suffocating mix of unease, fear, and even the beginnings of dread. The spider devoured a Ken doll while blood and spittle dripped from its maw. The act was as viscerally disturbing as Goya’s Saturn eating his children, Shelob menacing the hobbits, Eraserhead or Fire Walk With Me.
The fact that the evening overall had a distinctive feminist and queer bent, while the performance reflected male violence back to the source, was a grinding, grounding thought.
Not all the performances were as dark as this terrible arachnid; there had been laugh-out-loud humour or Pythonesque absurdity scattered through other pieces, but no doubt could be cast on where the entire show reached its crescendo, nor the power contained within that moment.
An uncompromising, often uncomfortable, yet always entertaining watch, Leg Business took direct aim at several of the issues with modern feminism—namely, the clash between societal expectations and the male gaze versus the ownership, celebration, and sexualisation of one’s own body.
For the most part, the performance navigated this glaringly obvious dichotomy extremely well. Leg Business had a strong voice and an even stronger point of view. The audience was given much to ponder well after the lights had gone up and the artists had departed.