Strictly Ballroom The Musical.

It wasn’t so much an opening night of a musical – more like the launch of a rocket ship.  But imagine if technicians at Cape Canaveral were still tinkering with the spacecraft as the countdown drifted perilously close towards the phrase …blast off.

Strictly Ballroom The Musical is everything you would expect from a Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin extravaganza. Utterly gorgeous costumes and sets, loads of laughs, plenty of surprises and Australian as the Hills Hoist.

But it is not yet everything you would expect from a musical.

The take-off was spectacular. Every seat is colour coded so members of the audience can barrack for their dancing duo. Onto the stage to the strains of the classic Johann Strauss waltz come the contestants dressed in their ballroom gown finery. New lyrics add a fresh twist to the schmaltzy music.

Then the dancers strip off to Samba their heart outs and we are introduced to the main players of this parable, which Baz tells us is fundamentally about the tyranny of authority stifling creativity and the legend of the ugly duckling.

Having had our high cholesterol opening, suddenly the audience is served a diet of musical courses with strikingly different flavours. 

We go from classic Viennese waltz to a techno electro dance number I Can Fly, then a dollop of Time After Time, followed by Dance to Win with Russian influences (and a bit of goosestepping to boot) and then a cheesy number called Heavenly Pineapple which needed six composers and four lyricists to get to the stage. It included the line: Others may be cute (but) I have the sweetest fruit.

No wonder the audience felt a little indigestion at this point. It wasn’t that the songs themselves were a problem but did they work as a casserole?

The elephant in the room was that Baz Luhrmann himself part-composed or wrote lyrics to 18 of the songs. So also as the Director and writer of the book, which was inspired in part by his own experiences as a ballroom dancer as a child, was there anyone on the team able to tap him on the shoulder to suggest which of his songs were superfluous?

Dropping songs from a new musical during the development process is a painful but essential element to success and the first act was a little on the long side.

We had to wait until just before interval to ease the heartburn. It came with a stirring and swirling adaptation from the opera Carmen where the family of ‘ugy duckling’ Fran broke in her new dancing partner Scott, in a joyful and energetic Spanish foot stomp.  

The second act was more satisfying as the narrative moved at a much faster pace.

There was even a batch songs composed in the old fashioned way by one or two people. Vander and Young’s Love Is in the Air instantly lifted the musical into a more familiar realm and we got a chance to like Scot and Fran more.

Thomas Lacey and Phoebe Panaretos shone on the dance floor in their roles of a lifetime. Thomas had a number of dazzling solo routines which he accomplished with panache.  

But no members of the cast delivered a moment that sent a shiver up your spine with their singing virtuosity.

There were many fine acting performances. Heather Mitchell and Drew Forsythe as Scot’s parents had the show business mother and eccentric father routine down pat. They were matched by Fran’s charismatic flamenco dancing father Fernando Mira and her stoic grandmother Natalie Gamsu.

Robert Grubb as the evil Barry Fife had a handful with the over-the-top songs he was handed. One pitched him as a fascist leader, another with its flag waving resembled a scene from Les Misérables.

The members of the opposing dance duos had many choice dance moves to ham up and lines like  “If I was Scott I’d be spewing.”  Will that stay in if the show goes to Broadway?

But no matter how quirky the demands of the director, the set and lighting designers came up with the goods. The most memorable was a sublime revolve where Fran and Scot danced on the roof of his  parents’ dance studio under the ubiquitous Coke sign and hills hoist.

Strictly Ballroom The Musical is a thoroughly entertaining night out but just needs a few creases in its frock ironed out.

David Spicer

Images: Lightbox Photography