Review Roundup: FLASHDANCE

Flashdance The Musical, based on the Paramount Pictures film (screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas, story by Tom Hedley), is produced in the West End by Christopher Malcolm, David Ian, The Baruch Viertel Routh Frankel Group, and Transamerica.

Set in Pittsburgh, USA, Flashdance The Musical tells the story of 18-year old Alex, a welder by day and 'flashdancer' by night, whose dream is to obtain a place at the prestigious Shipley Dance Academy. This musical about holding on to your dreams and love against all the odds features an iconic score including Maniac, Manhunt, Gloria, I Love Rock and Roll and the Academy award-winning title track Flashdance -What a Feeling.

Michael Billington, The Guardian: For all its internal contradictions, the piece is extremely well staged. Phillips's dazzling choreography embraces a wide variety of styles. The louche abandon of the routines at the niterie where Alex works is counterpointed by the ritualised sexiness of a rival pole-dancing club. A Nightmare sequence shows Alex's dreams haunted, in Bob Fosse style, by distorted black-clad bodies. Best of all is Manhunt, which starts with a flamenco dance staged on an upper platform and then shows how its urgent rhythms infect the dating of Alex and the boss's son as they move from moviehouse to restaurant before finally progressing to the bedroom.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/oct/14/flashdance-review-michael-billington

Michael Coveney, Whatsonstage.com: Well, Hedley may be half way there with this invigorating London premiere, which has transformed an okay movie with a few songs into a pulsating dance show with fourteen new numbers, a tougher narrative, and a well sustained metaphor of the Pittsburgh steel mill as a glorified dance floor. Above all, there is a wonderful central performance by unknown Victoria Hamilton-Barritt as Alex the welder that proclaims a new star is born. Nikolai Foster's production, designed byMorgan Large, is both exciting and stunningly efficient, with plenty of grime and welders' sparks, sliding factory doors and brilliant choreography by Arlene Phillips.
http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831287092696/Flashdance.html

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail: All this is eminently forgettable and formulaic. Not so the show's star, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, who plays Alex. What a belter! A beaver's cheekbones, a gymnast's physique, a big voice, bigger hair, and enough energy to fuel a Lucozade factory.  Miss Hamilton-Barritt is tremendous and ensures that this show should be at least as popular with teenage boys as hen parties. What with all the other glamorous belly buttons and upper haunches on display, it was just as well my 13-year-old son was not in the auditorium.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1320604/Flashdance-Enough-energy-Lucozade-factory-.html#ixzz12OMsUvbs

Richard Ouzounian, The Toronto Star: The direction by Nikolai Foster has embraced a kind of poor-man's-naturalism and hugged it to his chest so closely that it stopped breathing. When the sets by Morgan Large aren't being literal, they're being senseless and they are never attractive for one single minute. You might argue that a show set in poverty-wrackEd Pittsburgh shouldn't be pretty and I agree, but it must have a certain kind of esthetic appeal that helps frame its protagonists properly. Perhaps the evening's major villainess is Arlene Phillips who provided the choreography. I think it's time to permanently lay to rest the myth that Ms. Phillips can provide dance steps with edge. Her soul is on Main Street, not the Mean Streets and her breakdancing sequences are pure high school pageant. When she reaches for a surreal nightmare ballet in Act II, it's as though "Thriller" were being performed by the Golders Green PTA.
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/theatre/article/875685--flashdance-the-musical-good-on-the-page-bad-on-the-stage

 

 

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