Thanks for the Mammaries Breasts, Boobs, Bosoms, Bazongas, Jugs, Melons, Tits, Rack, Sweater Puppies, Fun Bags, whatever you want to call them…half the world has them, and the other half wants to look at them. That’s why Australian musical stage actress and comedienne, Emma Powell, wrote a show about them called “Busting Out”, which Cynthia and I and a few other SCNA members saw recently.

What Emma started in 2006 as a one-woman show called “D-Cuppetry” at the Melbourne Comedy Festival has evolved over the years to the present two woman show, and has various different duos and productions which have now been seen by over 250,000 people in Australia, New Zealand, and England. This version of the show, which stars Emma, and another very talented musical comedienne, Mandi Lodge, opened this month in LA, and will also soon be travelling to New York.

The 2-hour show was a hilarious, good-natured, ribald, celebration of women’s bodies, specifically breasts, in all their glory, through song, sketches, word play, tacky jokes, shadow play, and amazing mammary manipulation. For most of the audience, after the initial shock of seeing two middle-aged, plus-sized women expose their D-plus cups, which they affectionately named Hillary & Condoleezza, and Starsky & Hutch, they soon begin to realize that with their charisma, comedic timing, vocal and physical talents, Emma and Mandi successfully satirize the female form without sexualizing it. As Emma said in an interview, “Our show demystifies and celebrates what women actually really look like under their bras, and allows us all to share a good laugh at ourselves in the process.”

Throughout the show they playfully transformed their boobs into doughnuts, crying babies, sniffer dogs, burgers, and ABBA performing “Mamma Mia”. At one point they brought out a screen and engaged in shadow play to simulate the Taj Mahal, Batman’s Bat emblem, and to parody what happens when Dean Martin sings “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” among other equally funny images.

They also love to involve the audience, so since we were in the second row, your’s truly was picked out by Mandi early on as her comedic foil throughout the show. Their sketches ranged from a shopping channel sequence, to a rap song about mammograms, to a Chinese lactation consultant that resulted in the first few rows getting squirted, and a full on shower for me. They then came down and picked Brian out of the audience, and brought him onstage to get fitted in their Russian bra fitter sketch. Three female audience members were later brought up to compete, and see who could remove her bra the fastest, without taking her shirt off. Mandi had started off the 2nd act of the show with a side-splitting stand-up routine about women’s bodies, aging gracefully, being comfortable in your own skin, and all the challenges and joys this brings, which had the house rocking with laughter.

Overall, we enjoyed this empowering and affirmative celebration of the female body, validated by the overwhelmingly female audience, in which two “mature mums” have the courage to reveal their less than perfect and perky busts to challenge and satirize textile society’s image obsession. Or as Mandi added, “Two middle-aged women on stage getting their dangly bits out…what could be better?”