Review: THE RISE at Dôme De Paris
A sweeping, high‑voltage fusion of tap, jazz, and rebellion.
The Rise is a bold, large-scale dystopian musical from the RB Dance Company — a show that combines sung storytelling, choreography, and striking visuals into an ambitious and thoroughly entertaining theatrical experience.
RB Dance Company was founded in 2018 by Romain Rachline-Borgeaud with a stated mission to modernize tap dance and make it accessible to new generations by fusing it with urban jazz and storytelling. After Stories, their internationally successful debut production, the company returns with The Rise, a spectacular, albeit darker spectacle!
Set in a fictional "Nouvelle République," the show follows Ors, son of a high-ranking official, who is sent underground to prevent an uprising among the "Barbares" — the regime's exploited labor force, confined to vast subterranean worker cities. As he immerses himself in their world, he begins questioning the foundations of the regime, ultimately sparking a revolt that uncovers a secret tied to his own history. It's a timely premise, and the production handles it with real dramatic weight and theatrical flair.
Gathering 35 artists on stage with a colossal set and a runtime of over 2 hours, including an intermission, the show’s scale is genuinely impressive, and the staging at the Dôme de Paris — which opened in 1960 as the largest self-supporting light-alloy dome in the world — provides an epic backdrop.
As the company's creative force, Borgeaud again serves as director, choreographer, and composer. His choreography is strong: tap and urban jazz are woven into the narrative rather than performed as interludes, and the ensemble brings impressive technical precision and expressive range to the material, exploring collective identity, lineage, and belonging through a fiction that evokes different historical periods — from the French Revolution to the Second World War — without anchoring itself to any specific time or place, while the dance and music lend the narrative a dreamlike quality that creates distance from the harshness of events. The tonal balance is handled brilliantly, producing the best moments of the evening.
Compared to Stories, The Rise seems like a natural and impressive evolution: bigger in scale, more narratively ambitious, and more fully committed to the musical theater form. Stories won three awards at Les Trophées de la Comédie Musicale and has been seen by over 300,000 people — a strong foundation for The Rise to build on. Audiences expecting the tighter, dance-forward intimacy of Stories may need to adjust their expectations, but what they get in return is a grander, more sweeping kind of show.
Following its Paris run April 3-12, the company has announced extensions of into 2027 and a full French tour — an early vote of confidence that is well-earned.
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