To strip or not to strip was never a question at Bardlesque, presented by The Cyn Factory as part of the 5^th Annual Winter Burlesque Blitz at the Kraine Theater. Clothes were indeed removed during recitations of Shakespearean soliloquies. Skin was bared while the performers embodied some of the Bard’s most famous characters. Hosted by hirsute storyteller Peter Aguero as Falstaff, the show titillated and seduced by way of sparkling corsets, modern pop music, and 500-year-old text.

There were a variety of styles at the evening’s event. Some performers chose to perform to the text alone, such as Iris Explosion and Miss Charles Stunning, who recited their monologues as Juliet/Benedick ("Romeo and Juliet"/"Much Ado About Nothing") and Viola ("Twelfth Night") as though they were in a straight staging of the plays where the characters just happened to strip. Michael “Thunder Muppet” Villastrigo also performed to the straight text as the clown Launce from "Two Gentlemen of Verona". Although he only stripped to a pair of boxers, the monologue he chose was definitely conducive to taking off his clothes.

One not-quite-burlesque moment was when Miss Poison Ivory performed a very dramatic scene from "Julius Caesar" as Brutus’ wife Portia. She acted the soliloquy quite well in a gorgeous white gown, but it wasn’t until the very end that she completely removed her clothing. It was like a strange punctuation to the end of the scene, without any kind of strip tease as is the practice in burlesque. However, she returned for the second act in a triumphant scene as the heartbroken Julia from "Two Gentlemen of Verona", where she stripped to Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know”, then cleverly reverse stripped to put on Julia’s male disguise.

Miss Mary Cyn, the founder of The Cyn Factory, chose a hybrid of text and modern music for her performance as Emilia from "Othello". This was the best marriage of Shakespeare and burlesque of the night, her strip tease as classic as the Bard’s plays. She also returned later as mad King Lear while stage kitten Stella Chuu sprayed and doused her naked body with water.

All in all, Bardlesque made for an enticing evening of burlesque for fans of Shakespeare.