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<b>created by Baz Luhrmann, directed by Drew McOnie
David Mirvish and Global Creatures, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
May 3-June 25, 2017
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Scott: “Look at me like you're in love”
Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 film <i>Strictly Ballroom</i> was a simple and pleasant tale of rebellion against authority at home and in the peculiar world of competitive ballroom dancing. Luhrmann’s 2014 stage adaptation of the movie as a musical, now playing at the Princess of Wales Theatre, has lost its simplicity and suffers from a major identity crisis. It doesn’t seem to know what it is or wants to be. Is it a jukebox musical or a musical with an original score? Is it a broad satire of the ballroom dance world or a real story of fighting for success? While the show features superb dancing and singing from the entire cast, the show’s uncertain tone keeps us disengaged from the characters and the musical ends with a fizzle not a bang.
Set 1985 in Australia the plot focusses as does the movie on Scott Hastings (Sam Lips), who has been involved in competitive ballroom dancing since he was six. He was pushed into the sport because his mother Shirley (Tamsin Carroll) was a ballroom champion and now runs a ballroom dancing school. Her business and dance partner is the flamboyant (read gay) Les (Richard Grieve) while her drab, cowed husband Doug (Stephen Matthews) does odd jobs around the school. In this small, inward-looking world winning the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship is everything.
Problems arise when Scott and his partner Liz (Lauren Straud) lose a competition because Scott adds steps of his own invention. Liz, in anger, leaves Scott to join Scott’s arch-rival Ken Railings (Gary Watson). While Scott begins to question why he should be constrained to perform only officially sanctioned steps, Shirley and Les look for suitable replacement for Liz. Scott rejects all of them. Then the frumpy Fran (Gemma Sutton), a beginning dance student, suggests she could be his partner. Because of her Spanish background she knows how to dance an authentic paso doble as he learns from her family. The question is whether Scott will dance with the award-winning Tina Sparkle (Charlotte Gooch) at the Pan-Pacifics as Shirley and Les insist or with Fran with whom he has fallen in love.
The world of competitive ballroom dance is ripe for satire, a sport where the female competitors in Latin dance wear next to nothing and the men try to look macho while covered with sequins. Yet, the creators of the musical have to decide what their take is on this world. The film managed to balance satire with reality. The musical does not. That is because Luhrmann and book co-writer Craig Pearce have turned all of the main characters except for Scott and Fran into caricatures. One often thinks when watching Barry Fife (Julius D’Silva), president of the Australian Dancing Federation, Tina Sparkle or Ken Railings that they are deliberately trying to act as cartoonish as possible. The problem is that for there to be any tension in a play or musical there has to be a real feeling of menace. If, as here, Fife is shown to be an ineffectual windbag and Ken a preening airhead, the satire neutralizes them as serious forces of opposition.
The structure of the musical also militates our engagement with its characters. Virtually all the plot is crammed into the first act. The second act basically marks time until the climactic Pan-Pacific competition. We learn more about what happened between Shirley and Doug to lead to his present henpecked existence. The children in Scott’s home (Are they his brother and sister?) get an extended dance sequence all their own. And the question of who Scott will dance with is meant to hold our attention except that the answer is all too obvious.
The worse part is that Scott and (spoiler alert) Fran’s triumphant final dance toward which the whole show has been building is a terrible anti-climax. Scott begins with his signature move, a knee slide, but he is backlit so that we don’t even see it properly. Bits of their dance are intercut with other scenes so we get no sense of their winning routine at all.
As if that were not enough of an aesthetic problem, this is a musical without any compelling music. Like a jukebox musical <i>Strictly Ballroom</i> features songs from various sources that were prominent in the film. These include “Love Is In The Air” (1977) by John Paul Young, “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps” (1947) made famous by Doris Day, “La Cumparista” (1917) by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez and “Time After Time” (1984) by Cyndi Lauper. Rather than have a single composer and lyricist duo write music for the rest of the show, Luhrmann has farmed out the songs to several other composers including Elliott Wheeler, David Foster, Eddie Perfect, Sia and MoZella.
Thus, half of the score of <i>Strictly Ballroom</i> is like a regular jukebox musical and the other half is an assemblage of new songs from various sources. This half and half approach pretty much dooms the new songs to failure. Already well-known songs like “Love Is In The Air” used for the show’s finale, and “Time After Time” are simply more memorable than the tepid new songs that mostly sound like vain attempts to imitate hits from other musicals. Eddie Perfect’s song for Barry Fife, “Dance To Win”, sounds like a reject from from <i>Fiddler on the Roof</i>.
Given these difficulties with both the book and score, all that really carries our interest is the dancing. Here the show excels and anyone who enjoys ballroom dancing will get to see ensemble versions of all twelve official ballroom dances. The rest of the choreography by Drew McOnie consists of modern show dancing. Good as McOnie’s choreography is it is rather telling that the dance sequence that received the loudest and longest applause was a fantastic flamenco number for Fran’s father Rico (Fernando Mira) choreographed by the dancer himself.
The musical rests almost entirely on the shoulders of Sam Lips as Scott, who is on stage seemingly for the show’s entire two hours singing, dancing or both. While he is a strong singer it is the graceful athleticism of his dancing that makes him stand out. He is a pleasure to watch throughout as he executes all the moves of ballroom, acrobatics and modern dance with precision and perfect effortlessness.
As Fran, Gemma Sutton makes a believable transformation from ugly duckling to beautiful swan while always maintaining a likeable air of humility. The main peculiarity of pairing Lips and Sutton is that while they speak all the right words and dance and sing well together, they manage to generate almost no electricity. It feels as if they are both performing a duty to the best of their abilities without allowing themselves to become their characters. The flaw does not seem to lie with them but with the blandness of the book and the inattention of the direction which neglects to provide much detail of the process of the two falling in love.
Tamsin Carroll’s Shirley comes off as a stereotypically domineering wife and mother and and Stephen Matthews’ Doug as a stereotypically henpecked husband. Luhrmann shows that there is another side to both by the very end, but it would have been better if he or McOnie had managed to hint at this earlier in the show.
Julius D’Silva as Barry Fife, Richard Grieve as Les and Gary Watson as Ken Railings all present one-dimensional views of the men of the ballroom dance world – pomposity, effeminacy and vanity. They play their parts well but they can do nothing to make them more than near-allegories.
Fran’s relatives Rico (Fernando Mira) and Abuela (Eve Polycarpou) are presented as Spanish stereotypes – Rico as the ever-watchful father figure and Abuela as the soulful mother-figure. Even though they are living in Australia costume designer Catherine Martin dresses them as clichés – Rico for some reason always wearing flamenco dance get-up and Abuela all in black with a shawl. Despite this, Mira’s dancing and Polycarpou’s singing are the most effective in the show.
If your ideal of going to the theatre is to turn your brain off, hear a familiar song or two, laugh at predictable comedy, see lots of outré costumes and watch young, well-built men and women dance for about two-and-a-half hours including intermission, <i>Strictly Ballroom</i> is for you. Just don’t expect it to be as exciting as the movie.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (top) Sam Lips as Scott and Gemma Sutton as Fran; Sam Lips; the cast of <i>Strictly Ballroom</i>. ©2016 Alastair Muir.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.mirvish.com">www.mirvish.com</a>.
<b>2017-05-08</b>
<b>Strictly Ballroom</b>