Strangeways went to the Mexican Masked Wrestling/Burlesque/Comedy review known as Lucha VaVoom on Sunday night at The Showbox Sodo. The actual onstage action was great fun but I have a couple of beefs about the presentation. For inexplicable reasons, the wrestling ring was placed ON the Showbox stage which severely limited the sight lines for the audience. Since the Showbox Sodo is just a converted warehouse, it was not designed as a theater space and the audience floor is not raked. By placing the ring on the stage, only the few people in the front could actually SEE anything…also, it’s NOT how wrestling of ANY kind should be presented. Whether it’s legitimate Greco-Roman wrestling or WWF or Lucha, wrestling is a “in the round” experience with the ring as the centerpiece/stage for the event which allows viewing from ALL sides. Presenting it proscenium style is just wrong and lazy and bad theater. It also made for a very low threshold of headroom for the wrestlers…when you have a 5 foot high wrestling ring situated on a 5 foot high stage in a room with 20 foot ceilings and a beamed ceiling, you’re presenting the wrestlers with an awkward and potentially dangerous situation. I don’t know if the bad staging was Lucha VaVoom’s idea or The Showbox’s or both, but it’s one they should avoid for future Lucha events.
And, I encourage VaVoom to return to Seattle because the show IS immensely entertaining, a well-timed blend of sexiness, rowdiness and anarchic Stoogeian comedy. I had to leave at the first intermission, (headache/acute exhaustion from working 7 days in a row) but the two bouts and two strip acts I saw were all of high calibre. The luchadores featured in the first match were the husky but endearing Chocolate Caliente and the cocky, bratty, built like a brick sh**house, Joey Ryan. Ryan’s sexy strutting to his theme song, “Piña Colada” was a crowd favorite while Ryan’s beefy, hairy chest was a Strangeways favorite of the evening…The second bout was a tag team match and the definite stars of that bout were The Crazy Chickens, an energetically spastic duo prone to high flying attacks and frequent disco fits whenever the dj began blasting their theme song, DJ Farm’s “The Chicken Song-Techo Remix”. I loved them so much that I wanted to take them home with me! And Joey Ryan, but for different reasons…(Note: Joey’s pictures on the Lucha website aren’t very sexy…he now has short, sexy dark hair and he stopped manscaping/mutilating his beautiful chest pelt…)
Sorry my pictures are so bad but, 1)I’m not a photographer, and, 2)I have a cheap little digital camera that doesn’t really perform ideally in nightclub lighting. Also, I was really embarrassed standing in the official press photographers section with my $80 camera while the big boy/girl photographers were snapping away with their $3000 cameras…AWKWARD! ADDED: The Seattle Weekly has a photo slideshow of GOOD photos from the Sunday night show on their website, but some images are considered NSFW, so maybe wait until you get home to check them out…irritatingly, there are more photos of the strippers than the luchadores…
And, the show must have been a success because Lucha VaVoom posted on their website that “We’ll be back soon…” But, next time, PLEASE present the Lucha the way the Dio intended, IN THE ROUND!!!!
Top Two (Awful) Photos Credit: Michael Strangeways. Bottom photo from Lucha VaVoom website
-Michael Strangeways
About the Author: Michael Strangeways
Hey, that camera cost me $140 bucks and its takes a perfectly good photo.Its also positively reviewed on consumer sites!So Strangeways if your gonna be borrowing others property , don't be knocking it! Besides, have you looked to see if those professional photographers posted their pics yet? I bet there photo's aren't much different from yours.
I have had similar trouble with the newer digital cameras so I have all but given up on taking photos. The old digital cameras worked so much better – just point and click and they would take in the perfect amount of light even in dark spaces. I think modern cameras are all about getting the maximum amount of pixels and self (over) correcting the lighting.