

The cabaret began to shift from typical go-go boy show to an avant garde, high production value venue under the direction of Miss Tiger. Showtimes were select afternoons and nightly.
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Performances featured full nudity and there were typically three to four dancers a show. The Bijou Boys Erotic Cabaret featured solo performances by local and national male dancers. In warm weather, the club opened the Bijou Gardens, an outdoor playground. Guests were invited to rent a locker to store their street clothes and change into their " play clothing". Travel magazines implored readers to explore the "gay man's fantasy playground" replete with glory holes, dark corners, and a BDSM dungeon with slings, crosses, and other fetish objects. The Bijou Theater was widely recognized for its second-floor sex club. Titles found on the website were then available for purchase at the DVD counter. A desk and computer were set up for patrons who would like to peruse the Bijou's website listing over 14,000 titles. The theater's lobby hosted a DVD counter to purchase gay adult films. The Bijou Theater featured a 15-by-18-foot silver screen and seats 77 people in anchored, theater-style cushioned seating. The theater permanently closed its door on September 30, 2015. The theater also hosted live shows featuring adult entertainers, a non-sexual cabaret show written and directed by drag entertainer Miss Tiger and special appearances by gay porn stars. The Bijou Theater featured the "Bijou Classics"-adult films produced by Bijou Video in the 1970s and 1980s-every Monday. The Bijou Theater opened in 1970 and it was the longest-running gay adult theater and sex club in the United States. The Bijou Theater (often referred to as The Bijou) was a gay adult theater and sex club in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood. I could be wrong about this, but somehow I doubt coming generations are going to get nostalgic about the great video rental stores of their youth.Gay adult theater and sex club in Chicago
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Most vaudeville houses, of course, were eventually converted to movie theaters, and many of the latter were eventually torn down, so that today we have precious few Bijou theaters indeed, which doubtless accounts for the present sorry state of the Republic. The entrepreneurial team of Albee and Keith, said to have done for vaudeville what Rockefeller did for oil, opened Bijous in Boston and Philadephia in the 1880s, and thereafter Bijou theaters multiplied like rabbits.

It later became quite popular during the vaudeville era. But the name was probably common before then. The first such joint that I know of was Hartz’s Bijou Theatre, which opened (and closed) in New York in 1870. Since theater owners have always like to advertise the attractiveness of their establishments, and since bijou has the added advantage of sounding exotic, Bijou Theater was a natural. Eventually it picked up an adjectival use as a rough synonym for “charming” or “of intricate design” with reference to architecture–e.g., a bijou cottage.

The word entered the English language in the 1600s and has since resisted the most determined efforts to throw it out again. “Bijou,” originally a French word meaning “jewel” or “trinket,” was probably one of the five or six most common theater names in the country at one time (the others that occur to me offhand are Rialto, Tivoli, Adelphi, and Odeon). You say it BEE-zhoo, although depending on the neighborhood you can also get away with everything from BUY-joo to BEE-joe–when you start trying to dress up your establishment with a little dimestore French, you take your chances on pronunciation.
