Picture: Fiona Whyte for The TCB Group
Here Come The Boys continues at the London Palladium until 9 June 2021.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
If you’re a Strictly Come Dancing aficionado – and the audience for last year’s final peaked at 13.2 million – the two-hour dance-fest that is Here Come The Boys will be right up your alley.
As a Strictly groupie myself, it was certainly no hardship to watch these gifted professionals strut their stuff. And what a thrill it was to see a live show in a theatre, at the spruced-up Palladium no less, its boards trod before by so many great entertainers.
Even with obligatory masks, socially-distanced seating and a round-about route to the loo, it was an effort well worth making after 14 months of theatre deprivation. For the performers and creatives it must have been a huge relief to get back to work and make some money.
Strictly fans will know Aljaz Skorjanec, Graziano Di Prima, Pasha Kovalev and Robin Windsor, the four Boys of the title, as well as Karim Zeroual, the dazzling amateur who reached the 2019 Strictly final. He does a bit of dancing too but his main job is bounding around as compere and interviewer.
Batting No. 1 for the women is Nadiya Bychkova and in girl-power support are Ash-Leigh Hunter, Giada Lini, Grace Cinque-White and Rose Wilde, superb dancers all.
And there’s a guy called Bass6, a sort of warm-up act whose amazing vocal dynamics and weird noises provide the only humour of the night.
A grandson of the late, great BBC cricket commentator Brian Johnston, he becomes the DJ spinning the soundtrack of dance-floor anthems and club classics from ‘Tutti Frutti’ to ‘Hallelujah’, from ‘It Had to Be You’ to ‘Shallow Ground’, most at maximum volume.
The storyline, if there is one, centres on a Strictly-type competition where the audience applause is supposed to decide which of the four male stars wins each of four dance disciplines.
On this occasion (and I suspect all others) the four categories were Latin, Salsa, Ballroom and Rumba and to no great surprise it ends one apiece. Had it really been judged on audience reaction, Graziano, one of the newest members of the SCD team, would probably have copped the lot.
Newer Strictly addicts may not have heard of Robin Windsor who last appeared on that show in 2014 and later retired from the dance spotlight and became entertainments director at a luxury resort in St Lucia. “Never in a million years did I think I would be back dancing, and at the Palladium,” he said.
Windsor won’t see 40 again but performed as if his life depended on it. I’m no dance expert but I thought he was terrific. Just watching the boys in those high-speed routines made me exhausted. The fitness levels required must be sky-high, especially on two-show days. There are three more of those to come, on Saturday, Sunday and the final day, 9 June.
The show, which toured successfully in 2019 with just three guys, Aljaz, Giovanni Pernice and Gorka Marquez, has been revamped for its ten-day West End stay. For me, it lacks variety and would benefit from being a little less frenetic, a bit more romantic and it needs a sharper script.
There is a samey-ness about much of the high-energy, high-decibel material which only slows down for the Ballroom section. Some Tap would have been welcome.
But it’s a pacy, colourful, beautifully dressed piece of light entertainment that does what it says on the tin. Credit to director/choreographer Gareth Walker for that and the costume team of Carol Howard, Francis Campbell and Kim Bladon.
A shout-out also to set designer Steve Howell and Ryan X Howard for the atmospheric use of the video screen at the back of the stage. Finally a mention for George Michealides and Mick Scott, the back-up male dancers in the big group numbers.
The fourth star is for being one of the first shows off the blocks in getting the West End moving again.
Jeremy Chapman
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