The Lalas

A choreographer who wanted her own room

The Lalas exist because Erin Lamont, who created and choreographs the show, came up through the commercial end of the Los Angeles dance industry and decided to build something she controlled. Her own credits run through the parts of the business that pay dancers by the day rather than by the season: choreography for Lady Gaga, work on the People's Choice Awards, and appearances on CSI:NY and Jimmy Kimmel Live among them. She holds a degree in dance and a second in marketing from Western Michigan University, which is an unusual pairing and one that shows in how the troupe is run — it is a touring product with a booking agent and a price, not a scene night that grew.

In an interview on The Travel Wins podcast published on 18 March 2019, Lamont described the mechanics of the life rather than the glamour of it: teaching master classes across more than 40 US states, guest work at Broadway Dance Center Tokyo and Sydney Dance Company, and the problem of doing all that while raising a child. Her summary of it was that it is a grind and the skill is learning to sleep on a plane. That is the honest frame for what The Lalas is — a way of putting a group of in-demand professionals on stage together on their own terms, in a show where the choreographer picks the cast instead of auditioning for someone else's.

Beauty, brains, bustiers — the pitch and the personnel

The troupe's own booking material reduces the concept to four words: beauty, brains, bustiers and music. What separates it from a straight revue is that comedy and audience interaction are structural rather than decorative, and that Lamont hand-picks every performer from the pool of full-time working dancers in Los Angeles. The roster's collective CV takes in the MTV VMAs, Dancing with the Stars, and tours for Kanye West and Katy Perry; these are people whose day job is somebody else's stage, appearing here under their own banner.

The current company named on the troupe's own site runs to eleven: Celena, Haley, Kam, Liv, Margie, Mich, Morgan, Sarah, Saraanne, Tatiana and Tonya Kay. Not all of them appear on any given night — the line-up is assembled per booking, which is part of why the show can be resized for a 500-seat casino theatre or a corporate room without changing its shape.

The repertoire is a routine book, not a discography

There is no album to point at and no filmed special. The body of work here is a catalogue of acts — individually costumed, individually scored, built to be swapped in and out — and the claim the company makes about it is that no two shows are ever alike. Costumes are hand-sewn and rhinestoned in-house, and the amount of fringe involved is a running joke in the troupe's own copy about what it takes to get the wardrobe through an airport.

The soundtrack is classic rock and blues throughout, which does more work than it sounds like it does. It fixes the tempo and the humour of the thing somewhere closer to a rock revue than to a neo-burlesque cabaret, and it gives a casino audience that did not necessarily buy tickets for burlesque something familiar to hold on to. A Las Vegas Sun review, still quoted by the troupe's booking agency, credited the show with more personality than traditional burlesque revues and singled out its less orthodox routines, the reverse striptease among them — an act that runs the convention backwards and lands as comedy rather than tease.

Where things stand, September 2026

The commercial pattern is one-night bookings in casino event centres, sold through Ticketmaster at prices that put the show within reach of a walk-up crowd. The Seminole Brighton Bay Hotel & Casino booking announced in September 2025 is a clean example of the template: tickets went on sale at 10am on 26 September 2025 for a 22 November 2025 performance, doors at 6pm and curtain at 7pm, seats from $47, running time 75 minutes, with the room pitched at date nights and group bookings in equal measure.

As of late September 2026 the troupe lists three dates. The first is a Halloween booking at MGM Grand Detroit on 30 October 2026, an 8pm start scheduled through to 11pm, with tickets in the $45 to $75 range. Then come two December shows: Seminole Brighton Bay in Florida on 11 December, and Bally's Twin River in Lincoln, Rhode Island on 18 December, the latter billed specifically as a Christmas burlesque show. The seasonal framing is deliberate and it is the closest thing the operation has to a release schedule — the act book gets re-dressed for Halloween and again for Christmas, and the same rooms take it back year on year.

The absence of a residency is worth noting rather than lamenting. A Las Vegas sit-down is the obvious endpoint for a show of this shape, and the troupe has never taken one; the model instead keeps the dancers in Los Angeles between bookings, free to take film, television and tour work, and flies the company out for the night. It is a harder logistical proposition and a more sustainable one for performers who are not willing to give up the day job.

The show on stage now

The running time has been fixed at 75 minutes for years and the company does not pad it. There is no support act and no interval in the advertised schedule; the evening is the revue and then the room. Staging is portable by design — the production travels into event centres and cabaret rooms that were not built for it, so the work is carried by the costumes, the lighting the venue can provide, and a cast that has spent its professional life hitting marks on television.

What the material is actually doing, act to act, is alternating registers. A tightly drilled group number in matching fringe gives way to a solo built on a joke; audience members get pulled into the frame and handled with enough control that the interaction reads as scripted business rather than an ambush. The framing the company puts on it — a show for women, by women, in celebration of women — is carried in the programming rather than announced from the stage, and the crowds these rooms draw are noticeably mixed rather than the stag-night composition the genre's reputation suggests.