Flashdance The Musical, Shaftesbury Theatre

What a feeling? Where's the feeling in this lame retread of the iconic movie?

by Sam MarloweThursday, 14 October 2010

Out of step: Victoria Hamilton-Barritt and friends in 'Flashdance'Brinkhoff/Mögenburg

They keep on coming, these screen-to-stage musical adaptations, noisy, bombastic, as unsubtle as juggernauts. The best of them offer up their uncomplicated entertainment with some pizazz; but Flashdance is a particularly vacuous example of the genre. You probably had to be female, and teetering on the edge of your teens, to enjoy Adrian Lyne’s critically derided film back in 1983 (I freely admit that I was, and I did): Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas’s screenplay is both shapeless and pointless. This new version, written by Hedley and Robert Cary and directed by Nikolai Foster, does nothing to improve upon it.

The staging of the dance numbers ranges from dull to laughable

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