Hot Shoe Shuffle
David Atkins Enterprises
Her Majesty’s
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
One of the disappointments about show business at the moment is that almost everything is retro. It is as though we are so lost in a thrall of nostalgia that we have forgotten that when Forty Second Street first appeared in 1933 people walked into the movie theatres and saw images from the streets around them. Similarly, when South Pacific opened in 1949 the war was scarcely over. The same is true of Hair in 1967 – and so on. Compare this to musicals now. Is this the true curse of the postmodern – that we visit everywhere but where we are ?
Hot Shoe Shuffle is also a period piece, set in the late Forties and refering back to an earlier heyday of tap, but- much praise to David Atkins and his associates- plenty of attractively current spin has been added. The result is a show which is canny, quick and hugely entertaining.
The Tap Brothers, slick movers in the modern style circa 1949, discover that they stand to inherit a fortune if they faithfully learn their “late” father’s tap and cane routines. They also have to team up with their long lost sister, April – lanky twin, it transpires, to the diminutive Spring played by the energetic David Atkins. The situation is rich with gags (neat tall jokes suavely handled by Rhonda Burchmore as April, send-up Groucho repartee from the Taps) and full of opportunities for fancy footwork. Dein Perry’s virtuoso tapping is a highlight but rarely does the pace drop anywhere. Atkins and Burchmore appealingly maintain the central storyline, Jack Webster is smoothly comic as Reinfeld and the tap team kick up a storm.
The show is full of neat, self-regarding pop elements – abundant in the knowing dialogue provided by Larry Buttrose and Kathryn Riding, visually evident in the colourful, whacked-out perspectives of Eamon D’Arcy’s Fritz Freleng sets and the witty costumes by Skin Deep and Christopher Essex.
When the comic shenanigans are over the show segues smoothly into a complete Busby Berkeley finale with full band and a succession of dazzling threads. Again discover the show has real legs. No tired campy nostalgia here instead we re-experience the energy and virtuosity of the Broadway stage. The Taps open with a crackling version of Putting on the Ritz in which Dein Perry offers a blitzkrieg solo followed by routines from each of the team. Rhonda Burchmore, majestic in a succession of costume changes, holds every eye with How Long Has This Been Going On and the whole company breaks into It Don’t Mean a Thing.
Hot Shoe Shuffle is very much David Atkins’s enterprise and he deserves all success that comes his way. This may be American material but it also very likeably Australian. It is a show with genuine sparkle, full of talent and smart choices. Hot Shoe Shuffle and company are heading overseas in the near future. If they don’t get the jump on the opposition nobody can.
The Adelaide Review, September, 1993, p.41.