Took dancer less than a month to create topless show ‘Sexxy’

The third knee surgery will just have to wait.

Jennifer Romas knows “you don’t pass up an opportunity like this.” So when David Siegel, president of Westgate Resorts, asked her to create a topless show for the Westgate Las Vegas in less than a month, it was time to get out the ice pack and get to work.

Since she landed in Las Vegas in 1997, Romas danced in a lot of shows that probably didn’t stick around long enough for you to see: “Xposed,” “Striptease.” Or “Monster Circus,” in the big room of the Las Vegas Hilton that is now the Westgate.

Now Romas is scrambling to open the topless cabaret show “Sexxy” on Sunday in the Shimmer Cabaret, where she once danced with the lounge band Kristine W &The Sting.

Siegel saw Romas as the dancer for the Shimmer’s Prince tribute “Purple Reign.” After she helped out with some special events for the hotel, she says Siegel told her, “We need a sexy topless show in here. Can you make that happen?”

“I was like, ‘Sure. Of course I can.’”

Even if she didn’t get the green light until Dec. 6. And even if the show needed to be cast and rehearsed during the holidays, in time to open for the gentlemen of the Consumer Electronics Show.

“Honestly I’m in way over my head (in terms of) time,” Romas says, although friends such as veteran trade show producer Blair Farrington have come to her aid. “People are putting in extra time and extra hours on things like helping me sew. My friends have come to bat to save me.”

Romas has a lot of friends who have shared her struggles over the years. She formed JRR Enterprises last year after a male dancer in “iCandy Burlesque” dropped her. Her kneecap was shattered and required two surgeries.

“I didn’t work for almost a year because I couldn’t dance,” she says, and claims she has seen no compensation from the producers of the short-lived revue.

“I started an LLC because I needed to figure out some other avenues. I can’t really dance anymore.”

Despite the windfall of choreographing a dance scene in last year’s movie comedy “Think Like a Man Too,” Romas has indeed been back on her feet in “Purple Reign,” even though the pain is “excruciating,” she says.

“I’m holding off my third surgery right now” to do this show. “Again, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. This is my last hurrah. How’s that sound?” she adds with a laugh. “We do what we do. We’re entertainers.”

This echoes my first conversation with Romas in 2009, when she and then-husband Mario Ferreira were competing on “America’s Got Talent” as the acrobatic dance duo Mario &Jenny. “This is all we do,” she said then. “We don’t have another job to go home to when we come back to town.”

Reminding her she said that doesn’t make her take it back. “It’s just a passion,” she says. “Even though it’s stressful, even though it’s hard on your body, it’s got a lock hold on you.”

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