Musical producers and fans seem profoundly convinced of the democratic power of dance: whether you’re a fatty like Tracy (‘Hairspray’) Turnblad, a Geordie like Billy Elliot or a chippy welder like ‘Flashdance’s Alex Owens, you can defeat prejudice, change society and ‘have it all’ by ‘dancing for your life.’ As a political message, it’s sub-Friedmanite bollocks. But euphoria –‘What A Feeling!’ – is the aim here. And ‘Flashdance: the Musical’, though not nearly as true to its social and emotional roots as ‘Billy Elliot’, nor as much fun as ‘Hairspray’, delivers its emotional uplift with positively Reaganite efficiency.
If you want to pay tribute (that’s up to £55 of tribute) to the 1983 sleeper hit movie that launched a million sleepover parties, then ‘Flashdance: the Musical’ is ready for your coin. (Note to die-hard Flashettes: previews coincided with the release of Flashdance Barbie, complete with leg warmers though not, alas, blow torch.) It’s enough to make cynics suspect that the stage show is naught but a thinly disguised one-armed bandit of pop cultural nostalgia, luring us in with pumping ’80s power ballads and easy, boozy tears. But it’s not quite that cynical. Director Nikolai Foster, writers Tom Hedley and Robert Cary and choreographer Arlene Phillips have created a show which is loud, sexy and very familiar especially in the leg-warmer department. But it has some integrity: in the stage show, the clumsy addition of coked-up tragedy even gets in the way of the sentimental pay-off.
Edge is always a casualty on the every-broadening road from hip to retro, but Phillips does a good though inconsistent job in keeping the dancing a bit gritty: personally I’d have liked more of the body-popping, break-dancing boys and a lot less of the pole-dancing girls, though there was never going to be any way of avoiding the money-shot (if you don’t recall heroine Alex, splayed across a chair with water showering down on her like sparks, then check the poster). The Bob Fosse-inspired dream sequence in which luckless Alex is attacked by a dancing gang of robotic zombie hoodies is the only really embarrassing moment.
Victoria Hamilton-Barritt looks the part as Alex, and walks her boyish walk, but despite her physical hardness, you never get that sense of steely vulnerability or sheer urban frustration in her acting or her dancing; she’s talented, but no maniac on the dance floor. From the opening moment when she removes her welder’s helmet and shakes her mane of dark curls free with a showy smile, you’re in no doubt that this is tribute town first, Pittsburgh second – which is fine if that’s what you bought into, but hardly a destination its own right.