They have entertained Cheri’s Cafe six times a week for 20 years before hurricane Irma stroke. Five years later, the Hot Chocolate Band is back with a show as delirious and uninhibited as before at Sunset Beach Bar.
Everyone who knew St. Martin before Irma remembers the Sweet Chocolate Band, with its parodies of Tina Turner, Prince or Gilbert Montagné, its bawdy sketches and quirky songs. For 20 years, the five pals of this unhinged band have entertained Cheri’s Cafe, meeting place of tourists and locals in Maho. Spectators wearing huge pairs of breasts, reproducing choreographies to the rhythm of clapping, still remember. “Everything started in the 1990s, when I won the best Halloween costume award with my dress, my wig and my heels”, Mickey Hodge, one of the singers, remembers. “The owners of Cheri’s Cafe then asked me to create a show for them”. The project was such a big hit that the band performed this show “six times a week, 11 months a year” until 2017. Hurricane Irma destroyed the café, putting an end to 20 years of performance of a show that had become a must-see.
For people’s pleasure, they have been back since November 2022, but this time at Sunset Beach Bar next to the airport runway. Now called the Hot Chocolate Band with one less musician, the band hasn’t lost its sense of humor, its sauciness nor its energy. Even if the show has been reworked, let the fans of the first hour be reassured, the most popular acts like the imitation of Tina Turner or the Banana Man have been preserved. Alternating between interpretations of great classic songs and crazy sketches, Ivan Richardson “The Big Show”, Mickey Hodge “Sexy Mickey”, Steve Brown and Ronnie Warren interact with their audience throughout the performance, titillating the faint-hearted and involving the uninhibited.
In this new location, the troupe still had to adapt to many parameters. They had to get used to the space scenography, different from the one at Cheri’s Café; to cope with everyone’s physical conditions, “as we are no longer 20 years old!”, Mickey Hodge playfully points out; and to satisfy an audience which is sometimes nostalgic (some morphologies have changed, which has not failed to destabilize more than one long-time spectator). Despite all those changes, one thing is certain: "the pleasure to be on stage is intact and we are still having fun!” Mickey concludes.
HOT CHOCOLATE BAND
Every Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday starting at 7pm.
Sunset Beach Bar, Maho
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