Spa Pavilion, Strathpeffer, 27-28 June 2006

Ballet West's 'A Chorus Line'.

BALLET WEST provided excellent entertainment with their production of ‘A Chorus Line’, based on the original Broadway production from 1975, the music from which has been hugely popular ever since.

The Taynuilt-based ballet school and performing company formed in 1992. This young and talented company certainly showed their dancing, singing, and acting skills in what was an energetic and lively presentation.

The big numbers were performed with great enthusiasm – ‘One’, ‘Music and the Mirror’, ‘At the Ballet’, ‘Sing’, ‘Let me Dance for You’, and the rest, – the montage numbers being especially successful. The dancing and singing were accompanied by professional pre-recorded backing tracks.

The Pavilion stage provided plenty of width for the large company of twenty-one, but it let them down a bit in its depth, with the result that some brief moments of crowding were inevitable.

Despite this disadvantage, the original choreographer, Michael Bennett, whose production ran on Broadway for 6137 performances, would have been proud of this company’s colourful production of talented “gypsies” (a theatrical term for chorus dancers.

Many of the inexperienced cast were first year students at the school, augmented by four young professionals as guests. They stitched together all the elements and captured the soul of this great show with imagination and verve.

© Arthur Brocklebank, 2006