Backstage with the Aussie men heating up the stage in Las Vegas
IT’S been almost 20 years since Thunder From Down Under first heated up the stage in Las Vegas and they’re still selling out 12 shows a week.
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EVERY so often, when Alex Biffin peers through the spotlights at a laughing, cheering mass of women as he struts and strips in Sin City, the former Sydney farm hand can’t help but chuckle at where life has taken him.
As one of the stars of Thunder From Down Under, one of the world’s most successful male revues, which continues to sellout 12 shows a week in Las Vegas after almost 20 years, the 32-year-old reckons he’s the luckiest bloke in the world.
He’s travelled the globe, lives with his best mates, gets paid to work out and spends most nights winning the adoration of hundreds of women.
“What’s not to love,” he says with a laugh.
“Sometimes I think: ‘how did I get here?’. It’s a long way from riding horses and fixing fences, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
It’s impossible to miss Thunder’s presence in Las Vegas and Biffin’s musclebound torso is among those of six shirtless troupe members who stare broodingly from towering billboards throughout the city.
The revue has entertained more than ten million audience members, and is expanding through both Europe and into a second US residency in Nashville, which is America’s second biggest hen’s party market.
‘Non-sleazy and welcoming to women’
The 28 permanent Thunder members are hand-picked by the show’s Gold Coast based creator, Billy Cross and his wife Jackie. Only Aussies and the odd token Kiwi can sign-up, and the lure of joining their tanned and toned ranks has even seen Americans try to get on board.
“The fake Australian accents gave them away though,” explains the troupe’s long term publicist Penny Levine.
Cross, who started well-known Australian revue Manpower in the 90s and has helmed Thunder’s growth into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with his US-based business partner Adam Steck, says he knows straight away if someone will be the right fit.
“We are looking for down to earth, good looking Aussie guys who you’d bring home to meet your mum,” he says.
“We don’t want your typical dancer, model or actor.
“I always have a list of 50 or so who want to join the show, but the problem is the majority turn up with thongs and with a cap and chewing gum, and they annoy me in the first minute. He’s not the guy.
“There’s another guy turns up with a shirt and he’s really nice and humble and he really wants to get in. It’s the really good looking, humble and nice guy that we go with.
“And that’s part of what works so well for us. The women come and they fall in love a little with the guys, but they are not going to come and fall in love with someone who’s sleazy and full of himself.”
Among the 260 mostly female audience members when News Corp Australia visited a show this month were four bachelorette parties, a boozy gaggle of teachers from Washington and a couple of three-generation families.
An elderly woman who identified herself as “Grandma Evie from California” was a particular crowd favourite as she clapped along on stage while surrounded by half a dozen gyrating, leather-clad dancers.
The show markets itself as non-sleazy and welcoming to all women.
“We want everyone to have a good time,” Biffin said with a shrug as he carried a giggling audience member named Jill from her wheelchair onto the stage for post-show photos.
These moments of interaction are among the best parts of the job for Edward Brandli, 29, who studied primary school teaching on the Gold Coast before joining Thunder in 2015.
“Sometimes with the audience members, they will tell you just how meaningful it is for them, and it’s always a bit of a surprise,” Brandli says.
“I had a lady who came to a show and had just been given bad news that she had terminal cancer, and I had a beautiful moment with her after the show, where she told me about how the show had given her joy.
“I’m just up here having fun, but for it to turn out that it means so much to someone, it gives you a good perspective of the power of happiness.
“The only objective of what we do is to bring joy and that’s a real privilege.”
Also waiting in line for some photos after the show was former Brisbane woman Wendy Luyt, who was on holiday in Vegas with her mother Drienie Stols and aunt Riekie Enslin, both from South Africa.
“They loved it, and I wanted to bring them so they could understand what Australians are like,” she said.
“Everyone here is having a good time, it was like being back home (in Australia) again.”
Former Perth plumber Sean Batchelor, 29, clearly remembers the moment destiny called him to expand his horizons two years ago.
“I was plunging a toilet in a shopping centre in Perth and I couldn’t get it unblocked. I gave the plunger to my apprentice and said: ‘There’s got to be more to life than this’,” he recalls.
“I got online, just searching my brain for something else, looking for ideas, and when I came across an audition site for Thunder I reached out, and they came straight back to me.”
Batchelor sorted out his affairs and moved to Vegas for boot camp, where new members spend up to a year learning choreography and pumping weights. The beginners work as backup performers and sell merchandise and photos with fans.
They also learn “manscaping”, because those mahogany, hair-free bodies require full-time upkeep, and most of the team eat several meals and work out at least once a day.
This is the stage at which we meet Brisbane’s Alex Champtaloup, 26, who joined three months ago after being tagged by a friend on a casting call on Thunder’s Facebook site.
“I think they tagged me as a bit of a joke, but the post said something like ‘do you like travelling, do you like working out’? And it just instantly appealed to me,” Champtaloup says.
After his first audition: “I thought this all seems too good to be true, maybe there’s a catch, maybe this won’t be what it seems. But I walked out and I thought ‘I don’t think I can say no’.”
“I’m still learning the ropes, but it’s been really good, I don’t regret it for a second,” he says.
‘Women grab, scratch, rip, slap you …’
As the youngest Thunder member, Jack Jeffress, 22, is still settling into his new lifestyle after joining last October.
“I always say that travelling with the touring team is like school camp on steroids,” says the former Rugby Union player and physiotherapist from the Gold Coast.
He admits he also struggles at times with some of the more enthusiastic physical contact from fans.
“It’s a funny time to be doing this job when you think about it,” given the #metoo movement, he said.
“I am all for equal rights and empowerment, 100 per cent, but how do you get equal rights when some of these women will grab, scratch, rip, slap you …
“They grab parts of you, that shouldn’t be grabbed, so hard that it hurts, and you just look at them and say ‘that is so inappropriate’. Imagine if you walked into a female show and behaved like that, you would be absolutely ridiculed.
“It’s fine, it’s what we sign up for. But it’s funny, it’s something that we do talk about with each other a lot.
”There’s always one or two who just take it too far.”
Having once been slapped so hard he had a “hand shaped welt” on his backside for almost a week, Alex Biffin says he is no longer surprised by the rowdier crowds.
“You would not believe some of the things that happen, I’ve been pulled off tables and groped all over,” he said.
“But you learn how to deal with it, sometimes you just need to tell them to stop.”
The son of dairy farmers, from Camden in Sydney’s outskirts, joined Thunder after cold-calling Jackie Cross when he was 24.
“I hadn’t left Australia, so I thought ‘I need to travel but I don’t want to have to pay for it’. I had a friend who told me about Thunder and it sounded interesting,” he recalls.
“I wasn’t great at first, I had to go and learn to dance a bit, because I grew up with horses. So I started out selling merchandise and learning how it all worked while I trained and learned to dance.”
He’s now a solo performer in the resident team in Las Vegas, known as The King of The Beasts, and appears regularly in TV and film.
Biffin is one of the longer-term members of Thunder, but despite having performed almost every day for the past eight years, he has no intention of stopping anytime soon.
“A few of the older guys are leaving now, they’ve been going for a while,” Biffin says.
“But I am here ‘til I get kicked out, for sure.”
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This reporter is on twitter @sarahblakemedia
Sarah.blake@news.com.au