Flawed ‘Sugar Puppy’ worth paying attention to

There's a sweetness to Emily Lauren's very adult "Sugar Puppy and the Lovely Dumplings," now at the Onyx. The 50-minute one-woman show -- much too short for a fair-value evening of theater -- uses pantomime, sketch comedy, song, dance, puppetry, masks and plain-old raunchiness to give traditional vaudevillian burlesque a modern spirit.

We begin with Lauren strumming a ukulele in a brown plastic dog mask lip-synching to the young Judy Garland's "Over the Rainbow." The moment is unusually innocent and wistful.

Next, we visit with a girl who decides she wants to be a showgirl. Through dance, we experience her attempts to be sexy enough, acrobatic enough and even tall enough.

Most of the routines that follow -- each of which introduces us to new characters -- are much more sexually provocative. But you always have the feeling that Lauren is putting us on. She seems to be having fun with the ways women have used their bodies onstage to please men. There's even a reverse strip-tease, in which she appears near-naked and then suggestively begins to dress. She makes being covered from head to toe seem dirty.

The show ends with another pantomime from the "dog," and it feels right that all the sensuousness and enjoyable crassness should conclude with a return to innocence.

The 28-year-old Vegas resident has a face chock-full of big features, which makes for a perfect clown. But she's also as attractive as she is vulnerable, which is an unusual combination. You want to root for her characters the way you want to root for Chaplin's Tramp.

Her material, while rich in imagination, often falls short. The idea behind a sketch is often better than the result. And she could use a director to help with pacing and depth. (Yeah, I'd say even these sketch characters are good enough to deserve depth.)

But there's the seedling of something very worthwhile here. I'm not totally sure what it is, but I do know it's something worth paying attention to.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.