A Chorus Line
A Chorus Line
Sadlers Wells Theatre
Review Complete
“All that dazzles may not be gold”
Friday 2nd August
There is something for everyone in this production from the Leicester Curve. Great dancing, good singing and some drama provided by the dancers telling the story of their lives as we progress through the audition process.
The show was conceived from recordings of real dancers telling the stories of their real experiences at auditions and several of the contributing dancers were actually in the original production. If you have never seen this show before and know nothing about it, I think you may enjoy it more.
I found some of the directorial decisions a little strange. During the opening section when all the dancers were trying their best to impress director/choreographer Zak, played by Adam Cooper, - “God I hope I get it” - the dance captain, Larry, played by Ashley-Jordon Packer who is a wonderful dancer, was walking around with a camera filming the solo lines which appeared on a large screen stage Right. I found it unnecessarily intrusive, slightly out of sync with the music and each dancer had to turn upstage to sing into the camera. It took away the focus from the other dancers and frankly looked a bit gimmicky.
Some of the solo sections were also a little odd. For example Christine, beautifully played by Katie Lee, has a wonderful song - “sing” - where she tells us that although she is a great dancer, she can’t sing. In the original production she then sang the song just a bit out of tune, which was very funny. However, in this production, we never found out whether could sing because she spoke the song throughout until the end when she literally screamed the last few notes. The impression I was left with was a well performed rap, which was never the intention.
When Paul, beautifully played by Manuel Pacific, told his traumatic story to Zak, he was walking around all over the stage which unfortunately dissipated the power of this wonderful piece of dialogue and left me feeling far less moved that it should.
Zak stressed to the dancers several times during the show that they must dance with identical style and no one should stand out, which was why he was very hard on Cassie, his ex girl friend and a stylish, individual dancer fallen on harder times and in need for this job. Carly Mercedes Dyer was a strong dancer and a good actress.
The finale of the show, the iconic “One” number, was spectacular with great choreography and beautiful gold costumes including indoor fireworks and a confetti cannon. The only downside was that we didn’t actually get to see the company perform as an actual chorus line, which is really the whole point of the show.
All in all the performers were very good but some of the artistic decisions dubious.
Reviewer: Julia Rufey
We are Gifted tickets so that in return we may give an honest review. All comments are those of the reviewer and theirs alone.