Musical. Starring Christina Aguilera, Cher and Stanley Tucci. Directed by Steve Antin. (PG-13. 110 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

“Burlesque” is irresistible from its first minutes, and over time it creates a whole atmosphere, not only onscreen but within the audience. It’s big, perfectly cast and entertaining in every way, but more than that it feels like a generous public event. See it with other people. See it with a crowd.

You will know you’re in good hands 30 seconds into meeting Christina Aguilera, as a small-town girl who dreams of big-city glamour. Aguilera has the face of an actress, full of character and thought, and in this, her first screen role, she has an ease with dialogue that some people never achieve. Only when she opens her mouth to sing would anyone peg her as a pop star. Her deep, booming voice shakes the theater’s sound system, as Cher’s name flashes on the opening credits, and we’re off – to about as good a time as anybody’s going to have this year sitting down.

“Burlesque” is an amalgam of strains and elements from dozens of movie musicals: There’s the club that could exist nowhere on earth. There are dance numbers that could never really happen. There’s a paid staff of showgirls. There’s a scary brunette diva, and a young woman who’s going out there a child and coming back a star. There’s also a burgeoning talent who must choose between a rich guy and a nice guy – alas, they are never, ever the same guy.

Some will recognize these motifs from “Showgirls” or “Flashdance,” but to see these as cliches would be missing the point. “Burlesque” is operating within a whole musical tradition, with stuff in it literally going back to “The Broadway Melody” from 1929. The point is not that it’s possible to piece together a musical out of leftover parts, like Frankenstein, but rather that the old can become new again, when re-imagined for a new era and invested with enthusiasm and feeling.Let’s say something about Cher right away, or else people will start looking for the Cher paragraph. She’s wonderful in this. Over the years, she has done things with (and to) her face that make it difficult to cast her in a wide range of roles. But here, as a veteran singer and dancer who owns a struggling nouveau burlesque club in Los Angeles, everything about her look and self-presentation becomes a virtue. As befits a legend, the role and Cher seem to overlap. We watch both of them, appreciating the no-nonsense motherly warmth behind the glitz with a growing conviction that we’re seeing some original and very showbiz variety of a great woman.

The club in “Burlesque” has nothing to do with traditional burlesque. Aside from a single, chaste fan dance, the programs consist of production numbers performed by showgirls who dance and lip-sync. Only Cher, as the owner, sings in her own voice – she has two numbers; her second, the ballad “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” is what could be called “the song from the show.” Later, Aguilera also gets to sing. The soundtrack contains originals, as well as such nods to the past as “A Guy What Takes His Time,” which was hot stuff when it premiered in the Mae West film “She Done Him Wrong” (1933). As performed by Aguilera, it’s not exactly cold stuff now.

Four years ago, Jennifer Hudson became a star, and deserved to become a star, after stopping the show exactly once in “Dreamgirls.” In “Burlesque,” Aguilera is jaw-droppingly good in several numbers. Moreover, she makes us believe in this aspiring performer’s talent, in her consuming need to succeed, and in her essential worth as a person. The script was never going to earn writer-director Steve Antin a Nobel Prize, but it’s cleverer than it has to be. Right out of the box, Aguilera knows how to listen to her fellow actors, to react and be spontaneous, and it makes all the difference.

Good people surround her. In addition to Cher, there’s Stanley Tucci as the nice gay man who mediates between the owner (Cher) and her new star, in much the same way he mediated, as a nice gay man, between Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Kristen Bell brings force and subtle comedy to her role as a Burlesque diva who feels her star slipping and doesn’t like it. Unfortunately, the multi-talented Alan Cumming has little to do, even though this would seem to be his natural environment.

And then, it ends, two minutes before it might have started to sag. Antin doesn’t belabor the story. He cuts strings and dashes for the finish – just in time for the massive dance number that sends people out with a spring in their step and the energy to rejoin a world that, for two hours, they’d completely forgotten.

Source: SF Gate