Strictly Ballroom moves, but ...
PERHAPS, PERHAPS, PERHAPS THERE WERE TOO MANY COOKS IN THE KITCHEN
Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
Before it was a movie, Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom was a stage show, quite a modest one apparently: written and staged by Luhrmann himself when he was a theatre student in his native Australia. Then came a bigger, professional production in Sydney, and then the film which became a cult. So it was inevitable that there would be a new and much glossier stage version, a sort of reverse spin- off. Those who know the film have testified that the reborn stage musical isn’t strictly Strictly Ballroom at all. There have been too many softenings and additions. Even I, new to the material, can see the joins. I still find it a decent entertainment in its own right, though.
It has warm feelings going for it, energy, of course, and a sense of place. The last is rather remarkable since the production, on the first leg of a North American tour, comes to us from the West Yorkshire Playhouse in the north of England. The leading man is American; the other actors, as far I could gather from their program biographies, are nearly all British. Only a couple claim to be Australian, and one of those two, who makes an especially vital contribution, is part-Spanish. But the show still feels Australian; or rather it feels as if everyone in it shares a geography. The last musical I can think of to have accomplished this was Kinky Boots, ironically enough an American show set in England.
Like Kinky Boots, Strictly Ballroom is partly about a small business in trouble. Here the threat is to Kendall’s Dancing Academy, whose star pupil, a young man named Scott, is under pressure to come through in the national ballroom championships. It’s assumed he will easily do so, provided he a) finds the right partner and b) resists the temptation to improvise. We see him interpolating a couple of handstands into a rumba that’s routine, but he really doesn’t do anything else to stop the traffic.
These departures are still enough to earn him the enmity of the money-man behind the school, whose reverence for tradition is only surpassed by his general, and mostly unmotivated, creepiness. He can’t even keep his toupee on straight. He makes it clear: Scott will either toe the line or leave it.
The partner problem is even more vexed. Scott is bored, personally and artistically, by the long- legged lovelies with whom his elders keep trying to pair him up. But there’s an unobtrusive girl known as Just Fran who’s been hanging around the school trying to attract his attention, and she finally persuades him to give her a whirl — around the floor, that is — and of course they turn out to be ideal dance- mates and potential soulmates.
Things get positively West Side Story- ish when Scott follows Fran home, to Sydney’s Hispanic quarter. I never knew it had one, but apparently it’s vibrant. Fran’s proud father at first seems likely to take a knife to the man who’s been keeping his daughter out late, but settles instead for teaching him the paso doble — which, if anything, is even scarier.
Papa is electrically danced, and fiercely acted, by Fernando Mira whose accomplishments include being “special guest performer in Spain for the Andalusian government.” He’s also funny. He was the only actor all evening to make me laugh with a line-reading. He gives the show at its half- way point an electric charge that enables it to ride right through some cumbersome plot- devices in its second act. Most of the ballroom styles we’ve been shown are Latin anyway, so it makes sense that our hero should raise them to a higher power through what a real Latin has shown him.
Scott, meanwhile, has parental problems of his own. His mother, who practically runs the dancing school, is a control- freak given to emotional blackmail. His father, delightfully played by Stephen Matthews in a henpecked style that’s recognizably British, always looks on the verge of pro- testing, but never manages it. His sentences are shorter than his down- under pants. It’s obvious that there are going to be some shocking revelations about him in Act Two, but it’s a shame that they have to be made through a couple of clumsily melodramatic songs.
It’s hard to know whom to blame for this, as so many different writers are involved. Luhrmann gets credit for creating the show and, jointly with Craig Pearce, for writing the book. Andrew Bovell, the brilliant Australian playwright ( When the Rain Stops Falling) who wrote the movie screenplay, goes unmentioned. Another fine playwright, the British Terry Johnson, did the adaptation, and most of the spoken words are probably his. Johnson has written entertaining plays about Benny Hill, Alfred Hitchcock, Sigmund Freud and the Carry On films, but I wouldn’t say this script ranks among his best work as pop-culture commentator.
As for what’s sung: eleven different writers, including Luhrmann himself are listed as supplying “new musical numbers.” These, presumably, are the ones meant to forward the plot and develop character, though they do the first clunkily and the second not at all. So, for any kind of emotion the score perversely falls back on preexistent hits. Gemma Sutton pays tribute to Fran’s heritage by singing Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (aka Quizas, Quizas, Quizas). She brings urgency to it, as she also does to Time after Time, the Cyndi Lauper number, not the earlier and superior one by Jule Styne.
This is a score mysteriously full of songs whose titles have been better employed by other writers: Love Is in the Air, which was anticipated by Stephen Sondheim, and an abysmal number that has the nerve to call itself Two to Tango. Anyway, Sutton’s singing is stronger than her dancing, so the chemistry between her and Sam Lips’ no- more- than- likable Scott never takes hold, even though it’s what the show is meant to be about. The script hardly attempts to convey it, and Drew McOnie, the director and choreographer, is too concerned with moving the evening along to get into much nuance.
But move it he does, without insulting anybody’s intelligence. Many more pretentious productions have done less.
Runs until June 25.
IT FEELS AS IF EVERYONE IN IT SHARES A GEOGRAPHY.