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.