From ‘Magic Mike’ to ‘Stripped – The Play,’ male dancing back in spotlight

The year just passed was a big one for Magic Mike, Savage Steve and Jaymes and James.

Probably not so much for Bobby.

Thanks to the combined serendipity of the “Magic Mike” movie, the off-Broadway “Stripped – The Play” and TV’s “The Amazing Race,” 2012 brought new levels of attention and respectability to the male G-string revue.

Jaymes Vaughan and James Davis may be the first Chippendales dancers ever to be asked by a school principal to speak at career day, thanks to their visibility from “The Amazing Race.”

“We feel like fake celebrities,” says Jaymes Vaughan, the blond-haired member of the team. “We’re receiving a lot more press than the guys who won the thing.”

And when the “Magic Mike” movie became last year’s surprise hit? Steve Stanulis became a media go-to guy in New York, thanks to the serendipitous timing of the off-Broadway “Stripped – The Play,” which he co-wrote and acted in.

But Stanulis already had spun his dancing career into producing the “Savage Men” revue in Atlantic City. And now he’s reworked “Stripped” for Las Vegas.

“I took a five-year job and turned it into a 20-year success story, which is definitely not the norm,” he says.

Which brings us back to Bobby.

When Stanulis first became a male stripper at age 18, “there was this guy Bobby. He to me was the epitome of what a dancer should be.

“He was a phenomenal dancer, he had the long hair, all the girls wanted him. Loved him. Made probably a million dollars.”

But he didn’t hang onto it. “Blow, drinkin’, partyin’. He had nothing.

“Fast-forward 15 years later, he’s still doing it but people are almost laughing at him, snickering. Because he’s not in good shape anymore, losing his hair. I never forgot that.”

But that is the subject matter of “Long Shot Louie,” the just-completed independent movie Stanulis hopes will see distribution by March. “It’s about a guy who shouldn’t be doing it anymore, trapped in the world,” Stanulis says.

And it’s a reminder of the male revue’s image rehabilitation, at least in Las Vegas, which is more a case of perception catching up to the realities of the no-dollar dancing shows on the Strip.

“Stripped” – which opened recently as a midnight show in the Saxe Theater at the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Resort – is both a dance show and a behind-the-scenes look at the dancers. Dance numbers are interspersed with monologues about the dancers’ lives and their camaraderie.

It’s a tough show to cast, Stanulis says. “Physically you have to be believable as a stripper. You have to be able to dance, and you have to break the fourth wall and act.”

“We had guys come in to audition who didn’t even know what a monologue was,” says his longtime friend and co-star Brian S. Carpenter, who came along from New York to be part of the show.

Stanulis played a fabricated character in the New York version he co-wrote with original director Geoffrey Cantor.

But the media attention (including a New York Times profile) gravitated to the years Stanulis spent living a double life, working as a New York police officer by day and dancer by night. In reworking the play for Las Vegas (this time without Cantor), he decided, “Let’s run with that.”

“They’re real people, just like us and it’s good to get to know them,” Carpenter says of the characters. “We can identify with them. Everyone has their own cross to bear.”

SEEDY NO MORE

What the play format does for “Stripped,” reality TV did for “Chippendales: The Show” at the Rio.

“The Amazing Race,” which aired last fall on CBS, “let people look into the fact that we’re real dudes,” says Vaughan, the singing host of the revue.

It’s a bit ironic that he and Davis are now featured on billboards. The producers’ big push to renew interest in the show last summer came by hiring celebrity host Joey Lawrence – wait for it – while Vaughan and Davis were away taping “The Amazing Race.”

For years, dancers for Chippendales and the Excalibur’s “Thunder from Down Under” fought the same perceptions as their female counterparts in “Fantasy” or “X Burlesque”: trying to distinguish their work from that of strip-club lap dancers.

“We’re not strippers, and we don’t work in a strip club,” Vaughan says.

“We can’t stress that point enough,” Davis adds.

“People kept saying ‘Chippendales dancer,’ and ‘stripper, stripper, stripper,’ ” Vaughan recalls. “A lot of the (‘Race’) contestants even have come to see the show afterward and they’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize what you guys do. There’s so much more to it.’ ”

“Magic Mike” was last year’s surprise hit, but Channing Tatum’s character worked a grimy, backroom strip club. That made the movie a bit of a “double-edged sword,” Davis says.

“Yeah, it piqued people’s interest about what a male revue was,” he says. But when they came to the Rio show, “They were pleasantly surprised with the level of production that they saw.”

“I think there will always be that kind of stigma that Chippendales is like a tipping show, what it used to be back in the ’80s with greased-up guys and thongs and roller skates and all that corny stuff,” Davis adds.

“Gratefully, all that stuff has been done away with, it’s all updated. I think now more people are more enlightened to, ‘Oh my gosh, this is actually a full-on production. These guys are actually talented, they actually do something.’ ”

THEN AND NOW

Stanulis and Carpenter do remember a less-wholesome version of Chippendales. They were part of the brand’s breakout years in the early 1990s.

“When I started it, all the guys were really jacked, we all had long hair, earrings,” Stanulis recalls. “When we went somewhere everybody said, ‘That’s them.’ It was almost like a rock band.

“Now, the guys are very lean, clean-cut. You can’t decipher them from regular guys going out to a club. It’s gone to a lean, very clean-cut physique.”

As an 18-year-old college student, Stanulis didn’t have to think twice when a classmate recruited him as a dancer. In female strip clubs, a dancer’s usual goal is to separate a customer from his money with the illusion that sex is possible.

Male dancers found the sex more than possible. “The stories. You’d think we were lying about it,” Carpenter says.

“There was a half-hour window of what we called ‘dancer power,’ ” Stanulis says. “For the first half-hour after a show, you were like a god. After that, you were like a dude in a club again.”

But “The Amazing Race” drama focused on Vaughan’s attempt to raise money for his father’s cancer battle. And it’s a bit surreal to him and Davis to see youngsters and their parents staking out the Burger King next to the Chippendales theater, waiting to meet the two after the show.

“It’s helping change the stigma of Chippendales, because if these guys really are the trashy strippers people think they are, they wouldn’t be somebody that parents would let their kids look up to,” Vaughan says.

While the two say they have no plans to leave Chippendales, they are trying to translate their sudden fame into a new reality show that would continue their globe-hopping, as well as promoting Vaughan’s singing career and Davis’ band My Name Engraved.

“It’s kind of weird to be looked up at as a role model,” Davis says.

Vaughan says he is reminded, “even more than before, to watch what you say on TV, watch what you do in public, because you are setting an example now for the next generation.”

Words that never came out of the mouth of Magic Mike.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.