Stars of the AVT #43: Nasty Canasta
Photo by Don Spiro
This post is one of a series profiling the hundreds of performers I’ve presented through my American Vaudeville Theatre in celebration of its 15th anniversary. Don’t miss the American Vaudeville Theatre’s 15th Anniversary ExTRAVaganzain the New York International Fringe Festival this August!
I first knew Nasty Canasta when she was just starting out in burlesque in 2005. I was hosting Galapagos Floating Vaudeville; she and her then consort Jonny Porkpie would come in for the next “shift” — at midnight Nasty would go-go dance on top of the bar. This was the launch of her new career after what she describes as a disastrous fling with off-off Broadway theatre. She’d studied acting and costume design at Brown, but she learned that there are other uses for those skills. At some point during my six month stint there she performed at my vaudeville show. A couple of years later I interviewed her and Julie Atlaz Muz for this Indie Theatre Now podcast, where I got to learn more about her, if you’ll excuse the expression, “backstory”.
Nasty has become one of the most highly regarded artistes on the contemporary scene, largely through a combination of natural talent and hard work. She generally goes the extra mile in crafting a routine, resulting in memorable turns — real pieces of theatre — every single time. (See an earlier rave by me about her in this post here). In addition to being a frequent sight on the stages of most contemporary burlesque shows, she has been at the helm of several successful productions of her own, notably Pinchbottom Burlesque (which she co-produced with Porkpie); Sweet and Nasty Burlesque (her own show); and the highly literary Naked Girls Reading NYC chapter (see above). Nasty is also a character in Johnny Porkpie’s burlesque mystery novel The Corpse Wore Pasties, reviewed by my beloved Countess here.
To learn more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
