With g-strings and rhinestones, Company XIV’s ‘Seven Sins’ proves its good to be bad
Company XIV, head to Troutman Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and follow the trail of Frankincense in the air. Entering a converted warehouse, you’ll likely be greeted by an über sexy host wearing nothing but a bejeweled g-string and fur coat.
Don’t worry — you’re in the right place.Repeat attendees might think that after putting his signature mixture of baroque dance, cirque, opera, burlesque, and music hall on Tchaikovsky, Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, and Greek mythology, Company XIV founder Austin McCormick might have exhausted his bag of tricks.
But a reimagined incarnation of Seven Sins, one of McCormick’s hit shows, proves that naughty never gets old.Turning to the “oldest story in the book” (The Bible’s Book of Genesis), McCormick uses the fall of Adam and Eve (flawlessly danced by Scott Schneider and Chanel Stone) with some narrative assistance by a Fallen Angel (terrifically sung by Hannah Gil) and The Devil (the always sultry Company XIV perennial favorite, pop star, and chanteuse LEXXE) to take audiences on a multi-sensory journey.
An apple dangles over the heads of the audience by way of aerialist Nolan as a scantily clad Tree of Knowledge. Over the next two scintillating hours, that apple is passed from sin to sin to sin as matadors embody wrath, peacocks lure with vanity, and jealous lovers filled with the proverbial green-eyed monster spin overhead.
