The Stage

Flashdance - the Musical

Published Friday 15 October 2010 at 11:16 by Mark Shenton

After the hit run of Hairspray that put the Shaftesbury back on the West End theatrical map, another film to stage musical Flashdance has a tough act to follow. But it won’t be a flash in the pan or even a flash in Japan, as the notorious Nagasaki musical Out of the Blue was dubbed when it played there briefly and bombed in every sense.

Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (Alex) in Flashdance The Musical at the Shaftesbury Theatre Photo: Brinkhoff and Mogenburg

Instead, Flashdance is a slickly achieved hybrid of an adult version of Billy Elliot meets Fame, in which Alex, a young woman from the wrong side of the industrial tracks, working in a failing Pittsburgh steel mill, finds redemption in dance (and a relationship with the one of the mill bosses). She is seen pursuing her passion for dance via a night job as a performer in a dance bar, but her ambition to achieve a more formal training at Shipley Academy drives the plot.

It may be that Tom Hedley, who co-wrote the screenplay to the original 1983 film with Joe Eszterhas and now co-writes the book for the musical with Robert Cary, overdoes the dramatic stew as he amplifies it from the 90 minute film to a musical that runs 150 minutes including interval. But in providing a new feelbad undertow to the feelgood uplift of recreations of such celebrated pop hits from the movie as Maniac, Gloria and of course Flashdance (What a Feeling) as well as several new numbers, there’s a lot of storytelling for director Nikolai Foster to power through.

It is expressly and expressively despatched, thanks to the driving momentum of Arlene Phillips’s choreography that is threaded through it. The gritty book is well complemented by the witty urban dance that sparks up the stage even more effectively than the welding torches spraying orange flames.

A talented cast is led by Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, a dancing dynamo as Alex, who combines looks, legs, movement and vocals to brassy effect, and the sweetly appealing Matt Willis, formerly of pop band Busted, as her boss turned lover.

The characters sing of a “revolution in the evolution of dance” - this show may not be a revolution in the evolution of musicals, but as screen to stage translations go, it is a lot more effective than Sister Act, Dirty Dancing or Saturday Night Fever, to name three pop musicals in a similar vein.