This year’s edition of the annual Stageworks Worldwide Production at Blackpool Pleasure Beach may bear a marked similarity to last year’s but it has still been seamlessly tweaked and tickled enough to make it as fresh and fast as ever.
Some of the silk work and all of the aerial moments have gone but keeping their feet on the ice does no damage to what is still the country’s most innovative ice production.
This is always a show where no-one is a headliner but everyone is a star. Most of the cast have a clutch of skating awards and titles to their credit.
Natalia Pestova returns fresh from the last series of Dancing on Ice, her husband Alexei Kislitsyn won the Spanish version of the show and Hot Ice debutante Yon Garcia was its runner-up.
But their time in the television spotlight is beginner’s stuff compared to what choreographer Phil Winston puts this collection of familiar and newer faces through - as the occasional slip and tumble of real skating reveals. Watch Ruslan Novoseltsev and Anna Rechnio’s triple axels, Denys Petrov and Alona Kokhanevych’s duets, German teenager Steffen Hoermann’s skills or Jonathan Payette’s backflips if you want to see the difference between Dancing on Ice and reality on ice.
The two halves have their distinct identity - the opening Amarin switching from a funky Sugar Plum Fairy number to an erotic Whiptango and the dangerous title sequence, the second half’s Hot Chill reprising the popular jazz-inspired combination of swing, bebop and strut.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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