Review by Felicity Cozens

Love musicals?  Love Footlights?  Want a journey through every show they’ve done since 2014? Book through Ticketbooth and get down to Te Auaha on Dixon for a typically fabulous Footlights show!  Laura Gardner’s set is deceptively simple – a raised dais and a set of stairs topped by a platform – but it’s the trail of songsheets that grab our attention, wandering around the walls of the stage and indicating the mahi of this and every musical company.

The band enters to a rousing cheer and they do a beautiful and sympathetic job, never drowning out the performers – thank you to the excellent Chris Hayward for your perfect sound design.  It needs to be added here that there are certain performers who, when not dancing and singing up a storm, also play guitar, or flute, or conduct!

It was impossible to not sing along to this show – sooo many wonderful and well-known songs – the singing is uniformly good, with a few standouts who’ll go unmentioned simply because everyone has their own opinion of what a great singer is – plenty of them here anyway!  All the songs have been chosen with care, and the diction is perfect, never missed a word. The originality of the presentation and arrangements of different songs – thinking particularly of Show Me from My Fair Lady, and Being Alive from Company, is a joy.  The dancing is terrific, and Mel Heaphy and Katty Lau have made dancers and non-dancers alike look superb.

Thank You Ten is a slick show, it never flags, energy and commitment abound.  Beautifully directed by Laura Gardner.

A few things I’ve noticed over the years of watching Footlights’ beautiful shows are the joy each performer brings to the work they do, and they way they engage with the audience; and how performers communicate with one another onstage.  The work is always utterly honest and real – there is a respect for the work itself and for the privilege of being onstage as a performer. We, the audience are always part of the show, always invited along for the ride. That is the Footlights’ point of difference.