CHICAGO—Two women dressed in bright overalls, large baseball hats and giant handlebar mustaches took to the stage of a storefront theater here as music from the "Super Mario Bros." videogame blared.

In coy moves aping those of the real characters, they sauntered across the stage, swung their hips and struck a few womanly poses. One peeled off an oversize white glove, as the audience cheered, and then they started to banter in mock Italian accents.

"I can never watch the Mario Brothers the same way again," says Joshua Thomas, a 29-year-old rental-car manager in Orlando, who saw the show—headlined "A Super Mario Burlesque"—while visiting with friends.

Welcome to the quirky world of nerdlesque, or nerd burlesque, a place where women performers of all shapes and sizes bare their geeky souls, strip down to pasties and panties—and boldly go where no man has gone before.

The genre is taking root from New York to Seattle and many smaller cities in between, riding a surge in popularity of both burlesque, an old-timey form of striptease, and nerd culture—everything from superheroes, fantasy and science fiction to video and role-playing games.