Footloose script falls flat

If it is remembered at all now, Footloose is recalled as one of those mid-80s dance movies that wasn't Dirty Dancing.

It boasted an awkward coming-of-age plot, complete with complicated tests of masculinity involving tractors, and a career-launching turn from Kevin Bacon. But it had a catchyish theme tune, so one can only wonder why the West End musical treatment has taken so long.

At first glance everything, except Bacon and the agricultural machinery, seems present and correct. The characters still have daft names, for starters. There's Ren, the big-town high school senior forced to move to back-of-beyond Bomont, where dancing is forbidden because of a fatal car accident some years earlier.

Ariel remains the rebel daughter of Baptist preacher Shaw Moore, and everyone else sounds like extras from Grease. Or Fame. Or even, in the raunchier moments, Coyote Ugly.

Which is why Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie's adaptation of Pitchford's screenplay doesn't seem half so footloose and fancyfree. At least the film, with its tight denim and bad hair, was cohesively, convincingly of its time.

If Karen Bruce's production is of anything at all, it's of the latest window display in Topshop. Without this crucial anchoring sense of period, the creaky machinery of the danceban plot simply grinds to a halt.

Yet if the story has two left feet, the choreography (also by Bruce) is Rudolf Nureyev by comparison. An enthusiastic cast leaps and kicks up a high-octane storm, with impressively energetic routines coming hot on each other's high heels.

The non-musical moments contain a lot of badly placed emotional gloop for the leads to negotiate and the sparky Lorna Want as Ariel does better than most. Derek Hough's Ren, however, is boy-band blond bland and doesn't appear in total control of his coiffure. Stephen McGann is convincing neither before nor after the Reverend's Damascene dancing conversion.

Your toes may well be tapping by the end, but this won't have much to do with Ren and his rebels winning their cause in Bomont.

Until September 9 (0870 950

Footloose The Musical