Las Vegas – So there’s this guy who once failed a dancer’s audition for a Las Vegas show. He comes back some 27 years later with enough money to buy his way onto the Strip, producing his own dance revue.
Sweet justice? Yes. But will Las Vegas take the guy seriously when he’s John Stagliano and he made his millions as a pornographer known as “Buttman”?
Stagliano will soon find out. “The Fashionistas,” an ambitious stage adaptation of his 2002 porn feature of the same name, was finally set to open earlier this week after three months of rehearsals.
“I have to deal with those preconceptions,” he acknowledges. The show will have no actual nudity, but is chock-full of what the director calls “erotic ideas,” and it is staged in Krave, a new Desert Passage mall nightclub dedicated to the “alternative lifestyle” community.
“But that’s the least of my problems,” Stagliano adds. Last week, a day before “Fashionistas” segments were previewed during Krave’s grand-opening weekend, Stagliano was still dealing with automation bugs, trying to interface the live show with the connecting video on a nine-panel screen.
“The whole point is the video tells the story. If all these things don’t click at the right time, it can get a little confusing,” he says.
Trying to crack time code is an irony for the director, who says camera crews, lighting and technical details were “what I hated” about making videos, and one of the reasons he became his own cameraman to create the “gonzo” style for which he is known.
By dispensing with porn’s usually laughable attempts at storytelling, Stagliano learned “a girl looking straight into the camera being sexy has much more impact than being sexy with a guy,” he says of the more than 50 Buttman videos he released through his own company, Evil Angel, starting in 1989.
Stagliano stopped performing in 1997 after disclosing he was HIV positive. But his legacy still casts a long shadow, judging by his recent visit to the Rio for a remote broadcast on XM satellite radio’s Playboy station.
“John Staglianio is the Buttman, absolutely the best director in the adult industry,” proclaimed Juli Ashton, a former porn actress now working as an on-air personality. “I am so infatuated with this man,” she told listeners.
Ashton probably isn’t the only fan who was surprised when the director said on the air, “I have constantly felt that I was being more conservative than Enrique (Lugo, the show’s choreographer and leading man). I would let Enrique draw the line, and he would draw the line a lot further down there than I would have.”
Stagliano also claims his reputation generated a call from the Metropolitan Police Department after the show was announced. “I’m not out to challenge the county or break any taboos here,” he wants it known. “I’m out to do a good show.”
It’s something he’s wanted to do since at least 1983, when plans for a stage show were sidetracked by the early boom of the adult video industry.
“My past career and this career are related because I developed skills in my past career in order to do this,” he says. “But I don’t view it as a natural extension. It’s only a natural extension because I was a professional dancer and I always wanted to explore this medium.”
The Chicago-area native attended the University of California, Los Angeles as an economics major in 1972, but was sidetracked by modern dance classes that had more women.
In 1977, he auditioned for the “Lido de Paris” at the Stardust. But he’s 5-feet 9-inches tall and “they were looking for taller guys.” Besides, “I had only been taking classes for about two years, and I wasn’t very good technically.”
Two years later, he ended up in the first Chippendales male revue. Not having the beefiest physique, he hit the male dance circuit with creative routines, such as Dracula stripping down to bondage wear or a Catholic priest who came in to lecture the women about how they should “repress their desires.”
“That was where I became a creative artist, doing these strip acts,” he says. “This show more than anything in my life is an extension of that, more than my porno.”
Yet “The Fashionistas” is a direct spinoff of Stagliono’s magnum opus, a 4 1/2-hour DVD shot on 35mm film with a budget of $500,000, outrageously high for adult video. It has sold more than 50,000 copies.
The stage version retains the basic story, a love triangle between a famous male designer (Lugo), the manipulative head of a fetish fashion design company (Kelly Adkins) and her assistant (Marceea Moreno), who turns out to be the true creative force.
But the stage adaptation includes only a minute or two of the movie’s nonexplicit footage. The story is told mostly without dialogue, relying on the choreography and the lyrics of edgy rock songs by Lords of Acid, Tool and Evanescence, whose hit “Bring Me to Life” opens the show.
“I think I have a brilliant show that works really well as a dance show, and I’m not pushing any limits in terms of showing any flesh,” Stagliano says. “We’re not even topless. There is less physical contact between the performers than in `Zumanity.’
“There are more erotic ideas, though, behind the scenes and the way things are put together,” he adds. “My numbers have more sexual impact because you’re anticipating what might happen next, and it fits in with the story.”
“There’s a lot of topless shows on the strip, and there’s no reason for these people to be topless,” notes Adkins, who performed in the Riviera’s “Crazy Girls” and appeared in “Ocean’s Eleven” as a topless dancer in a scene with Brad Pitt. “In this show, it’s sexy having clothes on.”
Stagliano’s real boost from porn may not be his reputation, but the financial clout to do the show his way. He agreed to invest in Sia Amiri’s Krave — originally the Blue Note jazz club — on the condition that he could do the show there.
The financial independence makes a huge difference, says Adkins. “I’ve done lots of regular Vegas things, and they’re all formula,” she says. “You go in and you’ve got your typical cheesy Vegas music and all these other elements that come in when the hotel gets involved and changes the original vision of the show.”
“The fact that (Stagliano) does have the money to do it, he has the opportunity to say, `It’s my show, this is how I want to do it.’ ”
And if it doesn’t work, Stagliano always has something to fall back on: Two more 35mm porn features are on the drawing board.