Strictly Ballroom - WYP / Piccadilly / Tour

I think they already have :-)

For the people who have tickets for this, don't worry it's a fun show! Will Young is just a bit annoying at the start and then he calms down as the story takes off and we see him less. His outfit though!!! 😂 Time after Time is wonderful. The two leads are excellent and I found myself really rooting for them. I love Fran, she's adorable. The guy that's dancer 69 is pure comedy.

I agree that there's a lot going on on the stage. At some points the dancers are watching the show from the side of the set, eating popcorn and having a drink. Why??? They should get rid of that, it's distracting. It's still early days and obviously the show needs some tightening. I don't know what this is as it's not a classic musical but I know it's a good time. I definitely enjoyed it tonight and the people around me did too. Heard only praise and the audience was very well behaved. It was a fab last show to see on this trip. 😀

TodayTix are now doing £25 rush tickets for this

Scott Hastings - Liam Marcellino, Dale White
Fran - Selina Hamilton, Gabriella Garcia
Wally Strand - Ivan De Freitas, Justin-Lee Jones
Pam/Natalie/Charm/Auditionee - Leanne Pinder, Hannah Fairclough
Merv - Christopher D Hunt, Robin Kent
Shirley Hastings - Michelle Bishop, Leanne Pinder
Vanessa Cronin - Hannah Fairclough, Leanne Pinder
Les Kendall - Chris Bennett, Christopher D Hunt
Barry Fife - Chris Bennett, Christopher D Hunt
Wayne Burns - Jacob Maynard, Dale White
Doug Hastings - Christopher D Hunt, Chris Bennett
Rico - Ivan De Freitas, Christopher D Hunt
Abuela - Michelle Bishop, Leanne Pinder
Liz Holt - Leanne Pinder, Chrissy Brooke
Ken Railings - Luke Jackson, Chris Bennett

I meant to add

It’s a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously

But it’s well executed designed and choreographed

Costumes lovely

A nice bit of racial and cultural stereotyping

The end of the first half is excellently done

I think the band onstage makes it work well

Even the movement between scenes is thought out well

I actually love it

It never fails to amaze me how Parsley shoehorns an excrement reference into most of his show reviews.

Ah, of course

Parsley liked it

Therefore

It means

It's going to be

A runaway

Success

Maybe.

🙃

I found it to be excruciatingly bad. It's really a (bad) play with a "soundtrack" full of poorly drawn two dimensional characters; the night I saw it none of Ms Francolini's lines landed well and Mr Matthews was an embarrassment. Certainly not a musical and apart from the cod flamenco number closing Act 1, there really aren't enough ensemble dance numbers. It's a sin not to use a major talent like Strallen who dances superbly but only sings one line. Random songs are plucked from nowhere and apart from (I think Time After Time) none are sung through. Mr Young is inoffensive enough but why is he there at all? I am yet again in the minority as the obligatory standing ovation would attest.

'A nice bit of racial and cultural stereotyping'

Who could ask for anything more?

I saw and enjoyed 'Strictly Ballroom' tonight but I hesitate about putting my thoughts up here on TheatreBoard after reading some of the very severe criticisms other members have posted. But I am going ahead anyway!

Firstly, it seems that some of the members who did not enjoy the show are not relating it to the original successful and much loved Baz Luhrmann film on which it is based. OK, I guess that punters going to see a West End show will not necessarily be familiar with the movie on which it is based, but in that case why is 'Brief Encounter' currently playing successfully in the West End, and why are other shows based on movies like 'An American in Paris' considered to be so good?

For me, I thought Drew McOnie's work as director and choreographer is outstanding in the way he has captured the feeling of life in Australia in the 1950s in the world of ballroom dancing, much as he gave us New York in the 1940s in 'On the Town' last year so brilliantly.

The role of Wally Strand played by Will Young did not bother me although I couldn't help wondering what the show was like in Leeds before that role was added. But he sang well and I thought he fitted well enough into the rest of the story as a narrator.

I loved the staging, including the glamorous costumes and the band on stage, and I thought all the characters were surprisingly like those in the movie physically as well as dramatically. The principals were strong and for me it all worked as a realisation of the movie. OK, so Fran and Scott did little singing, but those two characters in the movie did not sing at all so what's the problem? In fact, come to think of it, none of the principals actually had any plot songs and, apart from Will Young's (frequent) singing, it was more a play with music where the music was to accompany the ballroom dancing. This worked perfectly well for me.

The only thing that did not ring true for me, as an Australian who lived through the 1940s and 1950s in Sydney, was the inclusion of several non-white performers in the ensemble. Now before you call for me to be deported, I do know and understand about colour-blind casting and diversity and all that sort of stuff in the theatre today. I am just saying that in Sydney or Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s you would not have seen any black or coloured people competing in ballroom dancing competitions. From 1901 to the mid 1960s Australia vigorously pursued what was known as the White Australia Policy, so much so that in the mid 1950s Ella Fitzgerald was refused entry into Australia to sing in a pop concert because she was black. The native black Australian aborigines did not participate in any way in social or cultural activities so to see those non-white ballroom dancers on stage tonight just looked wrong, especially when all the rest of the details establishing the Australian setting were well observed.

Finally, having paid full price for A10 in the front row of the Royal Circle I was not happy to get such a restricted view of the front of the stage due to the safety rail in a dance show where so much of the dancing by the principals took place at the front of the stage. I hoped that I would get used to the obstruction by the safety rail but it remained a major annoyance throughout the whole show.

Yes, showoff, what you say is right. But in my own defence, I meant it seemed wrong "to me" because it was absolutely not a diverse, multi-ethnic society in Australia in those days and I lived there in exactly those very days. Yes, of course there are theatrical conventions to be observed, especially in a musical, and regarding 'Hamilton' there will not be any members of the audience today who were around in New York in 1776 to have a personal response to how that show is cast. But if the stage version of 'Strictly Ballroom' is meant to be a theatrical representation of the original movie, which it clearly is, then to me personally, that was one element that was not accurately copied even though so many others were.

Knowing that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were white is not quite the same thing as having actually seen them in person and voted for them!

But your point about the addition of Will Young spoiling the film is a good one, and your arguments for the inclusion of BAME people in theatre today are persuasive. But I do wonder sometimes why those same people in general are not more interested in attending theatre as you rightly say. Even at Stratford East, where for the past fifty years the management of the Theatre Royal has been trying to establish a diverse and multi-ethnic local audience, this has not happened and it is the aim of the current chairperson and the new artistic director to shut down these activities and try to attract audiences from the West End to a kind of new cultural centre in East London which will presumably ignore the local BAME population unless they want to see Shaw and Shakespeare and the Greek classics as well as work by contemporary writers – and no musicals.

Oops, sorry but I am straying from the main point here which is the casting of 'Strictly Ballroom' and my personal reaction to it.