by Scott Steedman

...come to the Cabaret!

For more than a century, Paris has had a reputation for naughtiness. The liberal French attitude to nudity and sex has always added sauce to its night life, forever associated with Toulouse-Lautrec's dancers and Josephine Baker's bananas. The very names of the cabarets  the Lido, the Moulin Rouge, the Crazy Horse, the Folies Bergère  ooze high-class sensuality. In the popular imagination, Paris is a coquettish cancan girl flashing her knickers to the crowd. And the tourists love it: of Paris' monuments, only the Eiffel Tower attracts more visitors than the Moulin Rouge.

What remains of the Paris cabaret tradition? Great names such as Aristide Bruant and Edith Piaf launched their careers in smoky clubs with open stages, where amateurs could get up and sing and dance. These have all but gone, replaced by discos and bars with MTV. All that is left are the big cabarets, which put on truly spectacular revue shows.

The cabaret shows are not musicals with storylines. They are closer to Las Vegas, a series of grand tableaux and dazzling parades of glitzy costumes and corny tunes. What makes Paris unique is that the dancers are all but naked. Expect to see lots of breasts and bums, peeking through ostrich plumes and rhinestone G-strings.

With 1,100 seats, the Lido is the biggest cabaret, and its evening show, "C'est Magique," is the most expensive ever staged here. It features 60 female dancers, the Bluebell Girls, with a minimum height of 1 m 75 (five feet nine). One dancer described the show as "a dazzling parade, a real extravaganza," and she is not wrong. But don't go if you want Paris or the cancan; it's Las Vegas all the way, with a skating rink, lasers, a dazzling fountain sequence and more glitter than all the Christmas trees in Norway. The best performances literally take your breath away.

The Moulin Rouge opened with a cancan show in 1889 and has hardly stopped since. It is a huge enterprise, though next to the Lido it has a comfy, old-fashioned feel. It seats 850, with two shows a night; there are 350 employees, including 100 dancers and 80 waiters, who serve 200,000 bottles of champagne a year. Like all the big cabarets, it is expensive; a stool at the bar costs 360F, and dinner runs from 770 to 980F a head.

The show itself has fewer special effects, but more costume changes  1,000 in less than two hours. The dancers strut and swoon like exotic birds as the fantasies unfurl: a whirling dervish, a flamenco, Russian stomping, geisha girls... Suddenly a real horse trots on stage, followed by a massive live python writhing in a dancer's arms.

Sometimes the nakedness is comic, as with the topless evening gowns at the Viennese ball. But I felt a frisson during the Oriental tableau, when the slave driver cracks his whip at 14 beauties with nothing on but manacles and heavy metal wigs. Well, chacun son fantasme.

The cancan is the climax of a long Gay Paree tableau with Lautrec backdrops and nods to Baker, Piaf, Chevalier and Co. It only lasts six minutes, and you can see why; it's a real workout, a mighty gallop. Suddenly the girls (no one calls them women) are no longer parading, they're dancing and whooping it up. Then it's back to those syrupy songs that make French pop seem gritty as oatcakes.

Seventy percent of the Moulin Rouge's customers are foreigners, with Koreans and Russians joining the traditional groups of Japanese and Europeans. There are some Americans, though fewer than at the Lido or the Crazy Horse. The French visitors are mostly businessmen or visitors from the provinces.

The Paradis Latin has more French customers  about half of the total  and prides itself on being the most Parisian cabaret. The beautiful interior was designed by Gustave Eiffel, and the club opened the same year as his tower. The atmosphere is intimate: the MCs joke with the audience (no mean feat in 12 languages), and the waiters dance on and off the stage.

There are only 15 dancers, and some of the set pieces  a tropical island, a '50s dance  are a bit tame. Much better are Zizi Jeanmarie's "Mon Truc en Plume," a real music hall number done with a cheeky grin, and the bird of paradise, who flies in by trapeze and does a long, fluttering dance. The showstopper is the cancan, twice as long as the Moulin Rouge's and danced with real gusto. The whole thing feels more spontaneous, and it's nice to see the men high-kicking like crazy.

The Crazy Horse calls its revue Teasing "the most beautiful nude show in the world." It is a smaller venue, which makes the complete nudity of the 15 female dancers all the more compelling. You squeeze into red-velvet theater seats with built-in champagne buckets (all tickets include at least two drinks). The show is striptease of the highest class. The dancing and choreography are superb; many dancers consider them the best in Paris. There is a lot of visual humor, as in "God Save Our Bareskins," in which the dancers parade the colors in nothing but boots and bearskin hats.

Of the other big halls, the Folies Bergère stopped its revue show in 1995 and now houses corny musicals, and Terence Conran has just transformed the Alcazar into a giant designer restaurant. The Nouvelle Eve does a cancan revue, but only from March to September. Chez Madame Arthur, men do camp versions of Josephine Baker and the cancan; Chez Michou also does a drag revue featuring Piaf and Mistinguett.

Parents should consider taking their kids to the Lido's Christmas matinee, "Le Noël Enchanté d'Ophélie." As Australian choreographer Michael Montgomery puts it, "we shamelessly pilfered every fairy tale in the book." Its truly spectacular, with a princess and a wicked witch, dancing rabbits, a wonderful flying dragon, and witty touches like the ugly sisters in drag. You get most of the pyrotechnics of the evening show at a better price (130 or 160F, no child discount), without the nudity. Corny, but my five-year-old was blown away.