Just for kicks, imagine New York City, 1868: The bustling center of American culture abounded with theaters, P.T. Barnum-esque museums of curiosities, and the middle and upper classes whose sensibilities these entertainments are offended. British burlesque star Lydia Thompson and her sensual troupe, the British Blondes—short skirts and satirical skits in tow—stepped off their ship and into a foreign country teetering on the cultural waves of a nation in flux.

Though the Blondes dazzled the theatrical scene in their day, the descendents of what is now “classic burlesque” were soon relegated to the bottom rungs of tasteless, tassled, low brow entertainment, stripped of their creative liberties, and rather formulaically cast as realizations of male fantasy.

Over 140 years later, the creativity of burlesque has made a return farther up the coast in Boston, whose rich downtown theater district had, by the 1960s, devolved into “The Combat Zone”—a red light district of adult entertianment known for the sort of smutty striptease taht the world “burlesque” has been known to bring to mind. With the very popular holiday burlesque “The Slutcracker” now selling out shows at the Somerville Theatre and burlesque performances popping up around the area—increasingly with the support of the American Repertory Theatre’s Club Oberon—the comedic performance of strip tease is being revived to engage the short attention spans of a varied contemporary audience out more for social issues and sheer spectacle than simply flesh.

KICK START

“What does it mean to be a woman?” asks University of North Carolina professor Robert C. Allen, recounting the questions of gender that faced 19th century America. “What’s the nature of femininity?”

An historian of American Studies, Allen’s “Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture” is one of the leading discussions on the history of 19th- and 20th-century leg shows and the spectacle of the body.

“As burlesque becomes a working class form, the rich, multi-dimensional nature of traditional burlesque—women performing satirical plays in rhinestone couplets... [and] dressing up as men—that begins to fall away,” Allen says, “and what you’re left with is the display of the sexualized female body in motion.”

By 1937, the original burlesque—with its masculine mockery, scandalously underdressed women, and working class reputation—fell out of favor.

“[Then-New York City mayor Fiorello H.] LaGuardia basically said, ‘You can’t call anything burlesque in New York,’” Allen explains. “And New York being the theatrical hub, burlesque really folds.”

Of course, perceived social stigma is less of a deterrent now. Those seeking a strip show head to gentlemen’s clubs, not theaters.

“If they’re going to go see titties, they’re going to go to a titty bar,” says Vanessa “Sugar Dish” White, the mastermind behind “The Slutcracker,” which opens Dec. 10. A classically trained ballerina for 20 years, White entered the burlesque scene after an injury ended her ballet career; her cleverly-titled 40-person production is the redirection of her creative vision for the performance of movement.

According to Allen, a contemporary emphasis on expression rather than on simply dollars and cents has helped revive what had become more a business than an art form in the 20th century, allowing performers more control of their routines.

White’s show, for example, which uses the original Tchaikovsky “Nutcracker” score, returns to some of the theatrical elements of early theater in a way that is unusually expressive. “[M]y dancers, instead of just being these images on the stage, [are] allowed to engage with audience,” White says. “...Wink at people, stick their tongue out.”

And though it might seem blasphemous to some to appropriate the classic performance for a more scantily clad cast, Oberon producer Randy Weiner, the director and creator of “The Donkey Show,” notes that the same cries were made about the transplantation of Shakespeare into street gang life when “West Side Story” first opened.

For a modern audience generally jaded by the sex on TV and detached as a result of technology, burlesque possesses interactive appeal even while maintaining creative finesse.