Last night we – along with a range of oth­er fancy media types were invited by Pos­it­ively Wel­ling­ton Ven­ues to have drinks & canapes and watch Rock the Bal­let at the Saint James Theatre last night .  Based on the lovely people we met, and the amaz­ing food and ser­vice we were offered (Lightly seared tuna on wonton crisps! Veget­ari­an sum­mer rolls! Cho­ri­zo aran­cini balls! Mini cup­cakes that tasted like brownies topped with que­nelles of really excel­lent chocol­ate mousse! Lots and lots of cheese!) I would have no hes­ti­ation in recom­mend­ing PWV for your events. Rock the Bal­let, how­ever, was not really my thing. After the jump, blowup dolls, bad cov­er ver­sions and Chip­pend­ale dan­cers…

 “Rasta Thomas’ Rock the Bal­let is a fusion of clas­sic bal­let tech­nique blen­ded with the excite­ment of music­al theatre, hip hop, bal­let, tap, con­tem­por­ary, gym­nastics and more.

Rasta Thomas’ Rock the Bal­let fea­tures a stel­lar soundtrack includ­ing some of the biggest hits from U2, Michael Jack­son, Prince, Queen, Cold­play and Lenny Krav­itz.  Set against a back­drop of video pro­jec­ted scenery, the show is excit­ing, fun, fleshy, raunchy power­ful, and bril­liantly enter­tain­ing and as the New York Times wrote: “Rasta Thomas has enorm­ous tal­ent and undeni­able cha­risma”, “Excel­lent dan­cers”, “Crowd pleas­ing”.

There is no ques­tion that the dan­cers from Rock the Bal­let are very good dan­cers, with incred­ible physiques. And the middle-aged women in the audi­ence (and Sir Ian McK­el­lan) cer­tainly enjoyed it when they took their shirts off, if all the squeal­ing and clap­ping and cheer­ing was any­thing to go by. Hell, I like a V pel­vic bone as much as the next per­son, but it was def­in­itely unne­ces­sary to have them fin­ish on Right Said Fred’s “Too sexy”.  And there were oth­er aspects of the show that I found incred­ibly prob­lem­at­ic.

For starters, that soundtrack? I thought that maybe I was­n’t giv­ing the show a fair go because it star­ted out with a Black Eyed Peas track  (uuuuuuuuuuuuugh) but then I real­ised that all the music was cov­ers. Cov­ers that tried to be as faith­ful to the ori­gin­al as pos­sible, which made the fact that they wer­en’t even worse. Okay, I get that music rights aren’t cheap, but I guess because I’m kind of pedant­ic,

The one song that was­n’t pop­u­lar music was a piece from Car­men (I think), which fea­tured the men dan­cing with blowup dolls, to much tit­ter­ing from the audi­ence. Oh how dar­ing. Except that they wer­en’t even sex dolls with holes, they were just inflat­able. I wished that we could have seen women dan­cing with skill and artistry, instead of the kind of troub­ling image of some­thing sup­posed to be a woman being flung around on stage and com­ic­ally deflated. The fact that there was one woman dan­cer in the com­pany played up on this miso­gyn­ist tone, with some of the pieces com­ing off as a little pack-rapey. I thought the pro­jec­ted back­drops were poorly done (like a screensaver from Hack­ers) and unne­ces­sary because the dan­cers were more effect­ive against just dif­fer­ent col­ours. I also wanted a little more cohe­sion in story-telling, and while all the dan­cers were great indi­vidu­ally, they were slightly out of sync with each oth­er at times.

Okay, that said though, it was a little like watch­ing So You Think You Can Dance, which I do like to watch, except with all my least favour­ite songs (which I know is a very sub­ject­ive area). If you like it when men not wear­ing very much come out at WoW, or you think that dance can only be ponces in tights (and someone is try­ing to prove you wrong), then this is prob­ably the sort of show that you should go to. For myself, I think I will stick to the Roy­al New Zea­l­and bal­let.