On Your Feet! – Birmingham Hippodrome and Touring

On Your Feet! was reviewed at Birmingham Hippodrome and continues to tour until May 2020.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Those much-fêted Cuban-American musicians Gloria Estefan and her husband Emilio seem an ideal subject for a new musical. Fresh from Cuba and scarcely 18, Gloria’s voice and charisma astounded her future husband’s fellow band members. By 1977 she was the perfect choice as Miami Sound Machine’s lead vocalist.

The portrayal of her near-fatal tour bus accident in 1990, and her incredibly brave reappearance shortly after, is one of several moments when this staging touches the right nerve, uniting sounds, visuals, backdrop, projections – material for a certain hit. Staged music-free scenes exploring (in cleverly chosen detail) the Estefan story, highlighting both families’ human interaction, tiffs, doubts and reconciliations yield many of the show’s most engaging, thoughtfully scripted diversions.

What did this eager audience want? A host of catchy songs that made them dance in their seats. A visual feast, brought alive by brilliantly expressive, inspiredly rehearsed and sensationally executed dance. A story, preferably touching, sentimental and heartrending. They yearn for uplift from dynamic rhythms, instant buzz, shivers of delight down their spine. The joy of being lifted out of themselves. An invitation to share in a different world than their own.

People like those above can be sure it will have them kicking with delight. It will send you away in high spirits, knowing you’ve had your money’s worth – and much more.

But it’s those enticing vignettes, the spoken scenes, that made it for me. We witness, to a point, the humble beginnings Gloria Fajardo (and Emilio) went through. The central pair, played with pizzazz and niceish interaction by Philippa Stefani (Gloria) and George Ioannides (Emilio), are sassy leads and (mostly) attractive movers, largely to a blasting, brassy score (so were Emilio’s originals). The band (until very attractively later on) scarcely differentiates volume and mood from one mega hit to another (though ‘Conga’ is a ripping triumph for Danny Belton’s versatile, if over-egged, seven-man band).

For endless, even side-splitting humour and fun there is Karen Mann as Consuelo, Gloria’s typically common-sense, insuppressible granny. Madalena Alberto as Gloria’s vexed, defensive mother sings easily the night’s most inspired, authentic, fabulously articulated, solo, ‘Mi Tierra’, and offers the most genuinely Hispanic accent.

Nathan Zammit as the boy Emilio (and youthful others) is the most moving of all – loving, protective, innocent, instinctive and capering deliciously. Robert Oliver’s pushy impresario iss amusing, too.

This noisy, joyous show, directed by Jerry Mitchell, is full of life if not subtlety, with an excitingly choreographed ensemble (credit to Olivier and Tony Award winner Sergio Trujillo). Emilio Sosa’s costumes are great. Top marks, easily, to Kenneth Posner’s brilliant lighting designs: colour-rich, endlessly imaginative, counterpointing and pinpointing the action perfectly. In a way he outshone (literally) events on stage.

Roderic Dunnett