The place had a lovely oldy-worldy feel, with smartly dressed (all male) waiters attentively doing their thing.
Here's the bar. We were particularly impressed by the waiter's clever technique of opening fizzy bottles with one hand using the back of their knees in a quality (and slightly hilarious) little tango leg kick.
I had a beer with my meal and Clairy ended up with a ludicrously enormous vodka and tonic. The food was great. It really deserved a photo as I ordered what turned out to be a beautiful steak, with ham on top and covered with cheese. Ideal. Clairy liked her spinachy pie as well.
Soon enough we headed downstairs to our appointed table which we shared with two (amazingly) not very talkative Americans. They did helpfully take a piccy of us though which was handy as no flashes were allowed downstairs and our self portrait attempts were laughable. It was quite a nice little venue and everyone was seated at tables.
First the band came on, a violin, piano, double bass and of course accordian. They were really good, but shortly after the 'performers' came out and jumped into a hideously overacted 'history' of tango. It was absolute mayhem, with everyone on stage doing different things at the same time competing for your attention.
There was, in theory some kind of story going on, but even if you spoke the language the complete farcical lunacy of it all would have made it impossible to follow. It culminated with two of the chaps literally running round the theatre after each other in a mock fight with combs. What the hell was going on...this was about as far as you could get from the sexy sultry sophisticated dancing we'd come to see.
Fortunately after half an hour of total nonsence, they vacated the stage and left the musicians to try and redeem some credibility. And they really did, they were amazing and did some great tunes in the almost darkness (I was amazed they could see where to put their fingers) and were helpfully individually lit during their solos.
When the actors came back on stage they stuck to the dancing, and this amost made up for the completely barking first part.
Still a little too cheery in my mind for proper tango.
They were properly going for it, and even managed the synchronised bits pretty well.
But then...oh my lord. Another totally whacky non tango section. These two chaps came out with big drums and proceeded to do a strange drum/tap dance combo. It was intersperced with a totally unnecessarily noisy percussion/dance technique where they would tap dance and spin two balls on strings from their hands and bang them on the ground AS HARD AS THEY COULD. It was truly deafening. Clairy spent the whole 10 minutes (it felt like a lifetime) with her fingers firmly wedged in her ears. It was essentially a combination of our two pet hates in fellow travellers...Poi and Bongos, fucking nightmare!
Aaand breath deeply, finally they got back on with the tango.
The final dances were great.
Lots of great poses.
Swing those legs (but don't squash his knackers...somehow)
Some of the costumes were fun. Particularly this little number sported by one of the more chesty dancers. It was totally see through, and resulted in Clair shouting 'NIPPLES' in a quality whispering-but-actually-shouting way to draw my attention to the fact that her nipple covers had ended up in two very different places...it's the small things that make us chuckle!
The rest of the dancing was pretty good.
And we left feeling slightly borken and not really knowing quite how to feel about the whole event. It was definitely not what we had expected, but we still enjoyed ourselves. I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone without earplugs though.
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