Everybody knows that we love old things,” says the burlesque artist Angie Pontani, who is showing me the exuberant, family-hand-me-down-filled Marine Park house in in Southeast Brooklyn she shares with her husband, the musician Brian Newman, and their 8-year-old daughter, Sistilia. “And if you give me something, I can’t get rid of it.”
“That was my aunt Livia’s,” Pontani notes, pointing out the armchair in the living room, “from when she got her first apartment in the ’80s.” Pontani and Newman had it reupholstered in leopard. The matching ottoman, from her aunt Norma, dates from the 1940s. The bedroom set was her parents’. The chandelier is from Grandma Mary, “who brought it back from Italy in the ’50s,” she says. “There’s also Great-grandpa Paul’s office chair from his restaurant, Casa Lido, in Trenton.”
The dining table was her great-grandmother Sistilia’s; even their daughter’s name is an heirloom. “It’s a super-old-school name,” Pontani says. “It loosely means ‘sixth-born,’ like when they name you after a number. But it’s such a pretty name.” Some of what they have inherited were her father’s flea-market finds. “Growing up, this is one of the things that my dad would do every Sunday morning. We’d get up at five and go, and we’d just search for cool stuff.”
Pontani and Newman moved here in 2019 after living together in her apartment in Kensington. Her nephews were upstairs in the same building; family is important to Pontani. She is “100 percent Italian, born in Trenton, New Jersey,” she says, where every-one in her neighborhood was related and knew one another. Her family, she adds, “are very traditional,” but her father liked to paint and had what she describes as “extreme style,” including in home décor. She takes after him.
Pontani had always wanted to be in show business. But after a year in the acting program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she grew bored and dropped out. While working at a Tribeca café, she met a group of performers from The Dutch Weismann, “one of the first true revival burlesque shows in the city in the mid-’90s,” she says. Pontani signed on. “The show had dancing and singing and, of course, burlesque, but I didn’t even know what it was at the time. I couldn’t have cared less about stripping, but it brought out natural skills that I didn’t know I had in terms of costuming, choreography, and production.” (She was the co-producer of the New York Burlesque Festival from 2002 to 2023.)
Newman, a trumpeter and singer from Cleveland, moved to New York in 2003. He found music gigs on Craigslist. “I did hip-hop bands, I did Latin bands, I did jazz bands — literally, any gig that had a trumpet I would take.” He met Lady Gaga while bartending at St. Jerome on the Lower East Side; she was a go-go dancer and party promoter at the time. Later, he co-produced the track “La Vie en Rose” with Lady Gaga for A Star Is Born and was also the bandleader, arranger, and trumpeter on two albums by Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett.
Newman met Pontani when he answered a Craigslist ad that said “trumpet player wanted for burlesque troupe.” But he played it so cool on their first date — a Mets game in the best seats he could buy — that she wasn’t sure it was a date. Four years later, their friend the comedian Murray Hill urged them to go out again. They married in 2013.
Now, Newman is the music director of Bruno Mars’s club, the Pinky Ring, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. He and Pontani also have a residency in Vegas at the Nomad Library called “Brian Newman After Dark,” which Newman describes as “really a throwback to the old lounge vibes of Louis Prima in the main showroom with Frank Sinatra.”
“The biggest thing” about being a burlesque performer, Pontani says, “is this self-ownership of your sexiness, of your femininity, and you display it any way you want to in a satirical way.”
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