The Trocks: Dude Looks Like a Lady

"Is this really happening?"

The man sitting behind me at the Harris Theater, about 12 rows back from the stage, spent the first half-hour gawping incredulously to his friends, over and over, over the gasps and raucous laughter of the packed-house audience.

It's been two days since I saw Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo — the Trocks, if you're nasty — and what that man said still pretty much sums it up.

Scanning the program after I sat down, I saw a long list of Russian women's names: Sonia Leftova, Katya Lukinatmeya, Ida Nevasayneva, Vanya Verikosa… And I didn't get the joke. I thought tonight's performance was male dancers?

A woman with a heavy Russian accent did the pre-show announcements, naming off dancers who wouldn't be appearing for various reasons. Asked the audience members to silence their cell phones, or the dancers would be forced to do it for them… I still kind of didn't get the joke.

Turns out the whole thing is actually a joke, in the way of a Christopher Guest movie: The jokes are always funny at face value, but they're even funnier if you're intimately familiar with the subject matter. Or maybe it's like a Pixar film, which oblivious children can appreciate but adults love even more.

The Trocks are, put simply, men in tights. They are male dancers, prancing around in character as stereotypically catty, over-emotive ballerinas, making a ridiculous, beautiful mockery of serious ballet. They are silly as hell, exaggerating their movements, waving to invisible family members in the audience, and making silly faces that even the nosebleed seats could see. But they're so much more than just silly: They're so silly, in fact, that you're mostly too busy giggling to realize you're watching a bunch of obscenely skilled men, with tutus stretched taut across their manly frames…leaping around the stage en pointe.

I may not be a dance enthusiast, but I've seen Black Swan. I know how much that hurts.

All totaled, they spent about two hours up on their toes like that for four numbers: "ChopEniana," which was set to Chopin's music; the pas de deux, the hardest I've laughed by myself since the dress-shop scene in Bridesmaids; the grand pas de quatre; and an entirely nonsensical mini-ballet called "Raymonda's Wedding."

The Trocks milked the crowd after every performance, peering out from behind the curtain expecting one last round of thunderous applause…and they got it every time.

Because I'm a really terrible reviewer who doesn't actually know ballet at all, there isn't much more I can say about the show; the Trocks really are see-them-to-believe-them. (See?)

And the Harris Theater was a perfect venue to experience them: a modern setting that doesn't take itself too seriously but still has all the chops needed to show audiences an amazing time. Each floor — the balcony's at street level, and four levels down you finally hit the orchestra, where I sat — is lit by garish colored lights and framed by industrial steel and cement, and the theater is much of the same: huge and avant garde and a lot to take in, but somehow it manages not to be cold.

I was convinced, walking in, that I just wasn't…enough. Smart enough, cultured enough, old enough, openly gay enough, rich enough, fashionable enough… God, it was a fabulous group waiting to enter the theater. But once the lights went down and the Trocks took the stage, all was forgotten. For those two hours, we all laughed so hard the tears flowed from our eyes, and sat transfixed in awe at these men in tights with more grace than anyone in the audience could ever dream of having.