REVIEW: Flashdance The Musical at The Kings Theatre, Southsea

When you’re moving home you kind of expect a few bits of tech to get broken, lots of shouting, some bicycles being wheeled around aimlessly and an awful lot of furniture removal. Tonnes of it. And that was what Flashdance offered in the background, which made the foreground just get in the way of the real action. The set shifted and reshifted and moved again and again as if trying it out every which way it could possibly fit on the stage. The tech had more than first night teething problems and the parking and re-parking of the bicycles was enough to make me want to invest in a cycle rack. And we all knew when it was coming as the audience was repeatedly blinded by lights in order for the set to shift yet again, under the cover of darkness.

I can’t understand why, in a show billed with ‘dance’ in the title, you’d take up most of the floor space with this nonsense? Especially as, on occasion, the new staging lasted for about three lines of dialogue before it was off shifting again.

Yes the iconic moments of the film are in there, and the cast give it some welly, and the songs and choreography were fun, but the heart of this musical got put in a van and shipped somewhere overseas as, with all that distracting staging, it was really hard to start to care about anything else than whether the cast would survive the travel sickness.

(My apologies to Pickfords. You didn’t wheel my bicycles around aimlessly).