Footloose

What would Sue Sylvester say? Apparently, Footloose is one of the most frequently performed musicals in American high schools, but presumably those versions don't include pole-dancing moves during Holding Out For A Hero, or quite so much general thrusting as this high-energy tour.

There's an obvious difficultly in creating a musical set in a town where dancing is illegal, which perhaps explains why it took more than a decade for Footloose to be adapted from screen to stage. Writer Dean Pitchford got around the problem by more or less just ignoring it – the audience come to see dancing, and so dancing happens, whether it's behind a garage, in a burger bar or down a school corridor.

Sure, there are some static scenes and a couple of earnest ballads, but the story really isn't important. The key points are that new boy in town Ren can't stand still, and also can't resist a bratty yet bookish preacher's daughter who “gets around”.

The show itself is weakly structured, with flimsy characters and dubious sexual politics, but the Eighties hits are a guilty pleasure and this production is worth seeing just for the brilliantly charismatic lead performance by Max Milner, who dances up a storm whether pirouetting solo or leading the cast in an exhilarating hoe-down.

It may be billed as “the dance musical”, but there's a band in the pit and the cast are vocally powerful, with refreshingly clear diction. Some of the cast appear a good bit more mature than the high-schoolers they're playing, and Steven Pinder is perhaps the least convincing Southern minister ever to tread the boards, but by the final attack on the title number such trivialities are all but forgotten.