If you think a show whose subject rises no further than the ankle is going to be shallow, then you’re damn right. Gloriously, multi-facetedly shallow, with everything from singing nuns to Banksy-style snogging policemen, verbal quotes from philosopher Thomas Hobbes and (of course) ‘Sex in the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, and musical quotes from Bach to Stravinsky.
Writer and composer Richard Thomas has made his name as an iconoclast, first through the obscenity-rich ‘Tourette’s Diva’, and then through ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’, which was famously accused of blasphemy. So it seems right that in this musical – transferred after its run at Sadler’s Wells last year – he has unleashed his scabrous wit on yet another sacred cow: the cult of shoe worship that has inspired everything from a new temple in Selfridges to trainer thefts on council estates.
It must be confessed that after the first ten minutes of this show, which whisks the audience through ‘A Brief History of Shoes’ and a short skit where a man warbles soulfully (or should that be sole-fully), ‘If you walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes… then you are a thief’, I wondered how, despite the choreographed slickness, it was going to stretch to two hours.
Yet, in preparation, Thomas interviewed scores of people in New York and London and his tireless research has yielded an abundance of musical sketches all deftly tweaked into existence by choreographer and director Stephen Mears. There’s ‘Vex in the City’, where a woman describes in psychotic detail what she will do to her shoe-borrowing sister. There’s the inevitable yet still delightful Imelda Marcos skit. The street-smart Kate Prince-choreographed ‘Sneaker Addict’. Nuns invoking the names of shoe designers as if they were saints.
To criticise it as superficial is missing the point: ‘Shoes’ gleefully proves that once in a while there’s nothing wrong with placing style over content. As an evening out, it’s kicking.