Aljaž Škorjanec and Janette Manrara, in Remembering The Oscars. Picture: Ryan X Howard
Remembering The Oscars, streaming until 17 April 2021.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
For one golden hour of dance heaven, Remembering The Oscars, featuring husband-and-wife Strictly Come Dancing favourites Aljaž Škorjanec and Janette Manrara, is hard to beat and almost impossible to fault.
This glossy celebration of Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated song-and-dance movies is a taster for their twice-postponed 41-date UK tour which is guaranteed to brighten the day of dance fans up and down the country from March to May next year.
Everything is of the highest quality, not just the dancing from Aljaž and Janette, but there’s a superb group of backing dancers, sublime vocals from Janine Johnson and Giovanni Spano, colourful costumes which change at bewildering speed, big production numbers and lavish, palatial sets.
The striking, shaven-headed Johnson is a new name to me but she sings with great warmth and passion and if anyone (other than Streisand!) has sung classics such as ‘The Circle of Life’, ‘The Way We Were’, ‘You Must Love Me’ and ‘Let It Go’ better than this sassy lady, I have yet to hear it.
Spano is no slouch either. The 2018 X Factor finalist comes into his own on ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, ‘On Broadway’ from All That Jazz and ‘City of Stars’ from La La Land, embarrassingly announced as 2017 Best Picture winner by Warren Beatty who was given the wrong card to read out. It should have been Moonlight.
For those who aren’t Strictly Come Dancing addicts, Aljaž won the Glitterball with model & TV personality Abbey Clancy on his Strictly bow in 2013 and Janette got her first maximum score with pop singer Hrvy in the latest edition in December when runner-up to Bill Bailey and Oti Mabuse.
They dance together quite wonderfully and what fabulous, inventive routines they conjure up with director/choreographer Gareth Walker. Whether elegant and romantic fiery and dramatic, or just flamboyant and fabulous, they have all bases covered.
Aljaž laments the absence of a Best Choreography gong at the Oscars – the last Best Dance Direction award was dished out in 1937 – and after watching this sumptuous feast of song and dance, he certainly has a case.
Starting in the 1930s with ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ from 42nd Street and ‘The Continental’, originally a 17-minute sequence towards the end of The Gay Divorcee, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, they weave a rich tapestry of Hollywood magic down the next 85 years.
What films they were! Flashdance, Dirty Dancing, Singin’ in the Rain, Carousel, An American In Paris, Mary Poppins, Beauty and the Beast, Cabaret, Chicago, Evita, that unforgettable tango in Scent of a Woman, a riot of colour with ‘Friend Like Me’ from Aladdin, the inevitable ‘Over the Rainbow’ and more right up to the big-production finale, ‘One’ from A Chorus Line.
The exciting Ash-Leigh Hunter jumps out of the ensemble and into Aljaž’s arms for the Evita sequence as Janette draws breath and the whole chorus is so dazzling they all deserve a namecheck. So take a bow Ediz Ibrahim, Grace Walker, Natasha Mould, Joshua Moore, Kate Kenrick, Scott Caldwell and Stuart Rouse.
The digital show was filmed at Bournemouth International Centre and the Apollo Theatre in London and produced by Steven Howard for TBCtv with music co-ordinated by Rob Eckland.
Nothing is ever perfect, is it, and I do hope the wrong spelling of “Honorary” in the label for the Disney segment can be changed. That apart, it is pure bliss.
Jeremy Chapman
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