We briefly discuss love. Not puppy love or tainted love, but love that wobbles your knees and breaks your heart. Maybe one day Ben will find the one. Who knows, she could be in the audience tonight, and their eyes will catch and their bodies will float toward each other like some movie dream sequence, the rest of the room melting away until only she and he exist.
Maybe.
It is then agreed upon that searching for love is futile, especially if you’re a good-looking 24-year-old bloke, as Ben is, and the world is your proverbial oyster.
“I’m not looking. Plus, you don’t decide that,” says Ben Hardy, in the upstairs dressing room at Joe’s Bar on Weed Street. “With our lifestyle, this active social life, it’s gonna be that one lady who will stop you dead in your tracks, and you’ll know.”
Two grown men talking about romance and life. It’s a beautiful moment that I would capture in a bottle and … oh, wait, there’s Stephen to my right, naked but for black briefs, hunched over with one foot on a chair, shaving his inner thigh with an electric razor. Well, then.
* * *
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Love, schmuhve. This is the brutal, unjust reality for the men of Thunder From Down Under, the Chippendales-esque male revue in the midst of a three-month, 42-show residency at Joe’s Bar. Throngs of women — picture the Ed Sullivan audience when the Beatles came to town — pay up to $60 each to watch them strip to their skivvies and touch their abs.
The novelty is that the cast hails from Australia, thereby exuding some exotic ideal of rugged outback kangaroo corrallers. But this is a false caricature. The six men of the touring cast don’t drink Fosters or keep koalas as pets. They say “shrimp on the barbie” as often as Chicagoans say “Bang Bang Al Capone.” (Asked what they missed about home, however — honest to God — they all just smiled and said, “a Vegemite sandwich.”)
They arrive at a North Avenue gym, not far from where they perform Friday nights and twice on Saturdays, to rehearse, wearing board shorts, tank tops and T-shirts one size too small. Nothing about them suggests Australia until they open their mouths.
It’s a superpower. Not until they say “mate” every other sentence or use words like “grog,” “chunder” or “drongo,” do you realize their capacity to melt the hearts of American girls is a dangerous weapon.
Here, in a floor-to-ceiling mirrored rehearsal space, they run through their opening number, a Motown medley beginning with The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” (wearing shiny red smoking jackets, bow ties casually undone) and segueing into Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (black dress pants, bare chests).
Every choreographed move is designed to 1.) accentuate musculature, 2.) convey suggestiveness and 3.) elicit unbridled screams. All was revealed during an intensive, four-week boot camp back home in Australia, where they’re taught to live life The Thunder Way.
“The Thunder Way … it’s a sense of self,” says Hardy, also the show’s emcee. “The show works because it’s showing Aussie guys with a fun attitude.”
This show is, in essence, a Backstreet Boys concert with stripping in the place of singing. It’s even assembled like a boy band, each man molded into a distinct personality — Jesse is the huggable boy wonder, Stephen the cheeky free spirit, Benny the carnival barker, Adam the rugged daddy-type, Aidan the exotic beat-boxer, Dan the quiet brooder.
Much of the cast comes from Australia’s Gold Coast, a sun-drenched surf town on the Pacific coast. There, the Thunder brand is a household name, something boys aspire to become a part of, in the same way an American kid might want to be Hulk Hogan.
The question arises, and, yes, they say, they’re all straight.
And: “All the guys are single,” says Adam Hughes, who serves as a player-manager for the cast and is Mr. August in the 2010 Thunder calendar. “It’s a single guy’s job. To maintain a relationship, you have to actually see them.”
The three-month stay in Chicago is an anomaly. In September, they’ll return to their life-in-a-suitcase existence, hopping from casino to nightclub in rental cars, the very notion of home a foreign concept.
But surely they must have no trouble getting girls. Anywhere, anytime, right? Here, they play coy.
After the question is rephrased three times, Hardy sort of relents.
“We’re young, single, healthy Australian men with a shiny outlook on life,” he says, wearing a scampish grin. “Obviously, the chances of you meeting more compatible souls is increased. We have a good time. We enjoy ourselves.”
* * *
Showtime: 8 p.m. Women in their Friday best file into the theater, where several large video screens show Thunder cast members emerging from a pool in slow motion or standing in a barren desert landscape, also shirtless. The soundtrack is “Axel F” from “Beverly Hills Cop.”
Upstairs in the dressing room area, there’s a waft of deodorant, Axe body spray, draft beer and dude. Nearly every shirt hung on the wheeled clothes rack is stitched with Velcro, for easy fastening and easier removing. A fair bit of preening goes on. Cocoa butter is applied on every inch of the body for that bronze sheen. Then, as the fog machine begins motoring onstage, the six men gather in a circle, hands in the middle like a basketball team in a locker room. They chant in unison:
Feel the rhythm! Feel the vibe! Look out girls, it’s Thunder time!
Every romance novel cliche is played out in living color. Pop cultural references abound: “300,” “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Old standbys like firefighters and cowboys are mainstays for a reason.
Several moves are automatic squeal-inducers: “The slow hip gyration,” always counter-clockwise. The butt reveals. And the hip thrusts, oh the hip thrusts. Hardy, offstage with a microphone, provides the sonorous thunderclap sound effect anytime they happen. The dancers mosey to stage left and — kaboom! — hip thrust. They purse their lips and slowly slide both hands down the front of their bodies — kaboom! — hip thrust. “Oh, hello to all the pretty ladies in the audience” — kaboom kablim kablam! Hip thrust hip thrust hip thrust!
The biggest crowd pleaser is called “The Reveal.” Two hands grab the openings of the shirt and, with a rip of the Velcro, there’s an explosion of chest and torso. White beams, called down-lights, shine from above onto the performers’ bodies, creating shadows that amplify the muscle.
The show veers toward R-rated category but never crosses it. Women pulled onstage seem to leave their inhibitions at coat check. They’re offered what amounts to a lap dance, only the men grab the women’s hands and place them firmly on their chests, basically saying, “Go for it.” And they do. They laugh, then bury face in hands in uproarious embarrassment.
“You’re in an environment where the girls are looking at you in awe,” says Hughes, 39, who taught physical education in a high school before joining the cast in 1995. “There are not too many jobs where people look at you like that. It’s something I don’t take for granted.”
Post-show, the women’s faces are uniformly flushed, perhaps from the rush of blood, perhaps from alcohol. A college-age woman named Caitlin said: “These guys did the dirty work. Now it’s swarming with girls in heat. It’s like, guys, come and get us.”
The men are in jeans taking their curtain call, shirtless of course, and invite the audience to come onstage and take a Polaroid with them for $20. About 100 do.
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Then they greet their waiting fans, who request autographs and take free-but-shirt-on pictures with their camera phones.
I’m talking with Jesse Shelley, a 24-year-old ex-rugby player known as Mr. Six Pack, when a pretty brunette backs her caboose toward his and starts rubbing up against him, back to back. I’m talking unadulterated, gratuitous rubbing. Jesse looks over his shoulder and shrugs it off, with eyes that read, “Eh, what are you gonna do?”
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Thunder from Down Under returns to The Venue at Horseshoe Casino Sept. 20.