Before pizza, there was Minsky’s burlesque

Minsky’s Pizza has been a fixture in the Kansas City area, but for decades the name Minsky was better known for its connection to the great American art form of burlesque. The four Minsky brothers — Abe, Billy, Herb and Morton — started presenting live shows with naked or nearly naked girls in New York City in 1912 and closed up shop in 1937.

The tale of the Minsky brothers and their bawdy burlesque is the subject of a new musical playing in Los Angeles, Minsky’s. The play was reviewed in today’s Los Angeles Times, where critic Charles Isherwood notes that the show is loosely based on the 1968 movie The Night They Raided Minsky’s.

I’ve never been able to sit through that film and now I think I know why: Isherwood writes: “It’s no celluloid treasure, padded as it is with long atmospheric passages showing people eating pickles and pastrami on the Lower East Side.”

I love pickles and pastrami, but I don’t particularly want to watch people onscreen eating them. That goes for pizza too.