They Took The Passion Out

Ran in today with my new Ipod gadget, which got the distance right this time, correctly indicating my run as just over 7km, I think that's pretty accurate. The weather wasn't great but somehow, I managed to avoid the worst of the rain.

L's back on the bike today, after she skipped a day yesterday because of the icy conditions. She probably made the right decision; if she’d had an ‘incident’; it would have put her off for good. Particularly as I find out that, a cyclist died yesterday after a collision with a car in Kirk Hallam, which is on my route. I wonder at first if it was someone I was on nodding terms with but it was early in the morning before I'm usually in that area, so it wasn't. Still not good news though.

This lunchtime we start the process of trying to replace the Flowerpot as our lunch venue, they still haven't got a replacement chef in. Our luck, as usual has gone to lunch without us, the Blessington's kitchen is closed for one day only, today. We ended up in the Seven Stars listening to Kelly Jones for a hour, the entire Stereophonics collection I think, and even then we only got a sandwich. That said the cheese and onion was good and traditional, strong chunks of cheddar, none of this grated rubbish.

I'm really looking forward to tonight at the theatre. 'Flashdance' was one of those movies that defined the early 1980's and among other things propelled the legwarmer to dubious stardom. It may not have been cool for a sixteen-year-old boy to like a film about dancing but I wasn't the only one.

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery and so many scenes from that film have been copied and parodied over the years. Now, twenty-five years on, further flattery arrives in the guise of 'Flashdance the Musical' at Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall, starring various minor soap stars and it even has a Nolan in it. We are four rows from the front and L has promised me plenty of thigh.

Everyone knows the plot, Pittsburgh girl Alex, a high school dropout, works among the blokes at the local steel mill as a welder and dances in a club at night.

Victoria Hamilton-Barritt who plays Alex, can sing and dance with the best of them but from the moment she removes her welders mask, I have a problem. Now this is probably a male thing but although she's got the hair, you can see straight away she's no Jennifer Beals and Jennifer Beals was Flashdance. Beals was your sexy girl next door, whom you could just about see as a welder but she made an unlikely dancer. Hamilton-Barritt with her perfect makeup is the opposite. She looks like a dancer or even a model, but you cannot imagine her living next door, let alone seeing her with an arc welder in her hand. Where as Beals spent the entire film in her scruffs and her lycra, Hamilton-Barritt spends almost the entire show in her designer jeans and as such seriously disappoints on the 'plenty of thigh' front.



I must say she's good in her part; it's just the wrong part. In fact, there are plenty of sound performances on the acting, singing and most certainly the dancing front, which was sharp, professional and well choreographed. Some of the characters were very well played, particularly the nightclub owners: - the bad guy, Dr Kool (Simon Harvey), and the good guy, Harry (Gavin Spokes).

The set was good too, with clever sliding panels to hide the scene changes. To further distract you they had soloists dancing across the stage while the scenery changed but I saw what they were up to.

Then there are those three memorable and heavily parodied scenes. First up, was what all the audience members who were 16-year-old boys in 1983 were waiting for. The notorious scene that suddenly all the girls were copying and frustrating boys everywhere with, where Alex casually removes her bra from under her baggy top whilst all the time carrying on her conversation with Nick, the nephew of the steel mill owner and soon to be her man. The scene works but it isn't as sexy because Hamilton-Barritt cheats, you can clearly see (from row four!) she has another bra on underneath.

Second up is the shower in the chair scene, its there but it's somehow unsatisfying, it seemed too short to me, too brief, not enough build up. After which we break for the interval, whilst they mop the stage down, we mop Daughter down after L unintentionally chucks red wine over her.

Part two and eventually, the memorable audition scene. This plays out well and enables Hamilton-Barritt to show off her dancing skills although the vocals to 'What A Feeling' are contracted out to others, most notably the girl who played Gloria, who's singing and acting is excellent throughout. Ah, Gloria, 'I think they got your number, I think they got the alias that you've been living under'. Quite. You weren't even called Gloria in the film were you?

They've renamed and rebranded her to fit the song. The waitress Jeanie, who aspires to be an ice skater but ends up working in a strip joint, skates to Laura Brannigan's Gloria. Not how the musical has it.



It's ok as musicals go but a lot of it just doesn't feel right and this is probably because a lot of the plot has been changed. In fact, the musical possibly overcomplicates the story. Whereas Nick loses an ex-wife, Alex acquires a mother, played by Bernie Nolan, who's possibly the best singer on show tonight, albeit in a small part. In the film, it was Alex's dance teacher who tried to persuade her to go for the dance audition and whose death it takes to jolt her into it, not her mother.

They've also ditched many of the original songs and replaced them with slower numbers that fit the plot, but they were incredibly cheesy and not very memorable. It's a shame, none of music in the film felt the need to fit the plot but it worked and whereas the film zipped along nicely at a rate of knots, the musical felt laboured to me. The film had energy but tonight only the finale of 'What A Feeling' had that buzz. Which is a bit like a band playing all their new material at the start and then saving the hits right to the end, it doesn't work.

It was still a fun night out but I'm sorry, I just don't like people messing with the plot or the songs. The song says 'take your passion and make it happen', well I think they took the passion out of this one.