How much Cher is there really to see in ‘Burlesque’?

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Rex Reed raised an interesting issue in his hilarious pan of ‘Burlesque,’ the new Steven Antin musical that stars Christina Aguilera and Cher. Judging from the print ads and posters for ‘Burlesque,’ not to mention her omnipresence on the promotional-interview circuit, you’d think that Cher was the costar of the movie. But as Reed put it in his review, Cher is ‘hardly in’ the movie. Well, he’s exaggerating, but not by much. One of my colleagues who went to a midnight screening of the film Tuesday night dutifully kept track of Cher’s screen time.

The verdict? Cher is in roughly 37 minutes of the 116-minute film, and a tidy percentage of that screen time is devoted to cutaways of the 64-year-old diva watching Aguilera perform. So if you’re looking for a lot of Cher on screen, you might want to get out that old ‘Moonstruck’ DVD. As the movie’s posters say, ‘It takes a legend to make a star,’ which in this case means that the legend must’ve struck a great deal to get equal billing.