While Broadway is more chaste than Burlesque, the two traditions sometimes share a glitter-and-fringe aesthetic that the 1959 musical Gypsy perfectly captures. In fact, before gentlemen’s clubs abutted Times Square theaters, the area housed vaudeville and the risqué art of striptease. So the relationship between theater and stripping is loose, unspoken, but ever-present. Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS first openly celebrated the ties between nude dancing and the musical community with a cheekily titled Broadway Bares fundraiser in 1992. That debut raised just over $8,000 dollars. The annual event has since evolved into intricate productions of muscled-up, all-male striptease, and 2019’s benefit raked in around $2 million. Tune in virtually this year for the second streamed performance from Broadway Bares, which features all new dances from the “vaxed and waxed” and is sure to inspire sweaty-hot shaking-it across the world. —C.J.F.