Brabbins and Fyffe: Burlesque

On a velvet-curtained stage, the bearded Brabbins, seated in a wheelchair under a tartan rug, assures the audience that his bespectacled accompanist Teddy Fyffe is far more cultured than he looks. The pair trade a string of dubious boasts about Fyffe's worldly accomplishments, ending with his new appointment as burlesque correspondent for a respectable ladies' magazine. Fyffe then takes to the piano for a jaunty duet in the comic-song tradition, in which the two gentlemen protest that feathers, balloons and disrobing dancers amount to witty, ironic high art rather than smut, their denials betrayed by an ever-growing pile of double meanings.

Brabbins and Fyffe are the show's take on the 1950s and 1960s comic-song duo Flanders and Swann, recast as performers of bawdy numbers.