Miss Rita's Lucha VaVoom is where body slams and nipple tassels collide

Miss Rita didn’t set out to become a burlesque performer, or run a lucha libre show. In fact, she was initially pretty reluctant to pursue either art form, let alone combine them.

Back in the 1990s, Miss Rita — more formally known as Rita D’Albert — was trying to make it in rock and roll. She played guitar in a number of Los Angeles-based bands, including the goth rock act Human Drama and the all-female garage punk group the Pandoras — a band that, at one point, also featured Kim Shattuck, who’d go on to find fame with the Muffs and the Pixies. 

She had friends who were involved in the then-underground burlesque revival scene. She was fascinated by it, but she felt like if she performed herself, people would take her less seriously as a guitar player — “that it would ruin any credibility I had built up as a musician,” she says. Eventually, she stopped playing in bands, and produced a successful independent musical based on the life of Axl Rose, White Trash Wins the Lotto. 

Then, one day, the pull of burlesque became too much for her to resist. 

“I basically said ‘f--k it, I want to do this,’” she says. “There's a little bit of terror [at] exposing yourself. And then, that first time, I got to that reveal and I spun around, took the bra off and had pasties on, and I was expecting the world to end or something horrific, and nothing happened.” 

That lesson was something she started applying to her life more broadly. “[There’s] something that’s so terrifying and impossible, and then [you do it] and it’s like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t struck by lightning,’” she says.

From there, Miss Rita was all in, founding a burlesque troupe called the Velvet Hammer Burlesque. And then wrestling came into her life. 

Initially, when a friend asked her to go to a show featuring Mexican-style pro wrestling — or lucha libre — in Los Angeles, Rita had zero interest.

“There’s rock and there’s jock, and I was on the music side,” she says. “I wasn’t into sports.” 

Nevertheless, she was convinced to tag along. Within five minutes, she was apologizing for “being such an idiot,” she says. “I immediately fell in love with it. I felt like such an asshole for being so closed-minded.”

She immediately saw the commonalities between lucha and burlesque, and started thinking of ways to combine the two. “I just remember thinking, ‘This is a time-honoured physical comedy [style], as well as an intense sport. But what spoke to me was the characters and the physical ability and mastery of comedic timing.”

The result of her desire to combine lucha and burlesque was Lucha VaVoom, a place where masks and nipple tassels collide in an action packed musical sideshow of dancing, fighting, and comedy. The show will be coming to Calgary on Jan. 24 as part of the High Performance Rodeo theatre festival. Back when she started the promotion in 2003, both lucha libre and burlesque kind of felt like anachronistic art forms from another era. “In the early days … a lot of the wrestlers wanted to stop doing lucha and go more extreme,” she says. “[They wanted] to take their masks off and do the extreme shows that were cropping up. And they felt that lucha was old-fashioned.”

She felt that by combining elements from the golden age of lucha and the golden age of burlesque, she could “bring about a new golden age” for both.

Of course, as Rita points out, she’s not the first person to think of combining lucha libre and burlesque. She’s an avid student of the luchador films of the 1950s and ‘60s, which would have wrestlers like El Santo and the Blue Demon — in full costume — driving around the Mexican countryside in giant American cars, fighting monsters and mummies and giant brains. 

“In every one, they stop at a go-go bar and watch a girl dance,” she says. “That was kind of where we found the inspiration and the mandate for the inclusion of burlesque in the lucha world. Those movies were a huge inspiration.”

One of the things Rita is proudest of is how Lucha VaVoom has used exóticos. Although exócticos — or flamboyant, effeminate male wrestlers — have been a feature of lucha libre since the 1940s, they historically haven’t been main event performers. Legendary Mexican American exótico Cassandro performed with Lucha VaVoom on and off for years before his 2021 retirement. “I called him the Liberace of lucha libre because he really had that [look],” she says.

After more than two decades, Rita says the secret to Lucha VaVoom is that it offers audiences a sense of escape. “There’s always a place for the mask and the fantasy,” she says.

Miss Rita’s Lucha VaVoom plays the WinSport Event Centre (88 Canada Olympic Rd. SW) in Calgary on Jan. 24.