Murderous Instincts is being billed as ‘The Salsa Musical’, but that may well be an offence under the Trades Descriptions Act. For while the score is infused with plenty of Salsa rhythm, the audience is kept waiting… and waiting… and waiting… and waiting before they get to see any real dancing of note. The reason for the delay is the show’s murder mystery plotline, in which the descendants of Bradford Buckingham return to his country mansion to hear the details of his will. All of them want the old man’s money and some of them might even be willing to kill to get it. A whole host of farcical entanglements follow and the show takes far too long disentangling them – at the Salsa’s expense.
In the first act, the audience is treated to just a few brief bursts of dance. As they go about their daily duties in the mansion, the servants and maids occasionally break into a Salsa, but only when the formidable butler isn’t watching them. At one point we see them setting a breakfast table to music, but sadly the choreography lacks the comic imagination of the famous Morecambe and Wise scene where Eric and Ernie prepare breakfast to the sounds of The Stripper. In fact, Jhesus Aponte’s choreography is a disappointment throughout. In the bigger, showy numbers, the stage has a tendency to look rather cluttered, and at no point did his choreography add to the dramatic thrust of the musical play. Nor was it used to delineate characters. Everyone just seemed to dance the same few, basic Salsa steps.
In Aponte’s defence, it can’t have helped that most of the cast were obviously hired for their acting and singing skills, rather than for their skills as dancers. But it did mean that several big numbers went to waste. I Never Knew You Cared was crying out to be danced to, but instead the two actors stood immobile on stage, conveying in trite lyrics what a great choreographer should have conveyed in movement.
Thankfully, we did get a glimpse of what we’d missed out on at the climax of the show. With the plotlines disentangled, the arches and pillars of the Buckingham Mansion flew up into the gods and the theatre was turned into Club Caribe. Lit in red, a band appeared on stage, the bongo drum player loudly to the fore. Then Aponte was given his chance to shine. Dancing with twice World Open Salsa Champion, Janet Fuentes Torres, he wowed the audience with the kind of sizzling, sexy salsa that we’d all come along to see. But even this was short-lived. After only a few snake-hipped moves, the rest of the cast returned to the stage and the choreography became somewhat cluttered again. The evening culminated with the cast leaving the stage and dancing through the audience for no good reason.
The Club Caribe sequence had only the vaguest connection with the rest of the show, but it did at least give the audience a taste of what they wanted – Salsa! But I doubt that it gave them enough of a taste. Having completed its initial run at the Norwich Theatre Royal, the show is now appearing at the Savoy Theatre in London’s West End. It opens on October 7. But hurry, hurry, hurry to get your tickets. Hurry, hurry, hurry, for the simple reason that it won’t be running for long.
Murderous Instincts opens at the Savoy Theatre London 0870 164 8787 on October 7, Mon-Sat 19:30, prices £10-£50
In the audience were people of all ages, starting at late teens and going way past seventies. Being a studio, it was very quiet as we walked in — it would have been nice if some atmospheric music had been playing, since we were going to a Tea Dance. There was no stage; it was all on the level with the seats rising. Despite this slightly alternative way of viewing, it really did project the correct ambience for the performance. The set was a large blue square floor with a round dance floor, eight chairs, two tables and the obligatory glitter ball.
The play is about four different people going to a Tea Dance. They are strangers to each other and strangers to the dance. Each in turn starts to think about why they are there. Their former selves start to come alive which is seen in the form of some very talented professional dancers, occasionally mixing the talker and the dancer (two different aspects of the same person) within the scene.
One of the characters, Sylvia, I disliked from the off – very snooty, nobody good enough, always criticising. But as the play progresses you really start to feel sorry for her. She was a dance teacher, met Pierre (Albert, from Bolton); he was interested in competitions and not much else. If they didn’t win he would go off and sulk for three days leaving her to find emotional balance elsewhere. He soon started to forget left from right, the onset of Alzheimer’s, for which she stood by him for 12 years despite the previous turmoil in which she had found herself.
Each of the characters had their own story, at times are quite funny, at times very sad yet always coming back to Ballroom dancing when they were younger in the 1960s. This is where the dancers shadow and take over as each story unfolds. Slowly the cast start to speak to each other and see that they have many things in common including, of course, dancing. Now this is where I had a problem. There were a few historical and technical aspects that presented me with a gripe. Tango was danced a few times but it was Argentine Tango. These people would not have been dancing that in the 1960s at a Tea Dance. One modern Tango was performed, and that was as a competition dance (powder puff dress, thousands of sequins) with the right type of moves for the era, and not a send up.
Ballroom competitors would not have danced Sequence dancing in the time that the scenes were set (definitely not Pierre), which then leads me to think that the choreography had a few holes to be picked at. They spoke a lot about Foxtrot, but didn’t dance any, one Slow Rhythm but no Foxtrot. When the Quickstep came on, they danced a Mayfair Quickstep, a Cha Cha Cha came on and they danced a Sally Ann Cha Cha (which came out in 1973) and when the Rumba came on they danced yet another Sequence dance Rumba One – sometimes on the 1, sometimes on the 2!!
Moreover, when you compare the technical content of the Argentine Tango to the competition Tango, it almost felt like I was watching the Argentine Tango straight from a video, the moves were so basic. The lust and passion within the competition Tango swept the floor, brushing aside the other dances, which seemed to have been included at the last minute, so lacking in oomph were they (and yes, granted, they were other people’s routines already — no inventiveness here at all).
For the above problems, I felt a little sorry for the actors, and I felt very embarrassed for the dancers.
The lovers were well played, with feeling and wit by Linda Broughton, Anita Wright, Gilbert Wynne and a somewhat sad Graham Bill. The dancers, who each played two characters, were Nicola Weeks, Alice Michael (last minute stand in, or so we were led to believe — at the after show party it turned out that she was in fact Alice Brickwood, the Assistant Choreographer — so not such a good performance after all), Matthew Day and Ashley Green — both of them very accomplished dancers and a credit to the profession.
I must say that for a Sunday afternoon it was enjoyable, some of the stories quite believable, and I suppose what matters most is that the audience, in a wide range of ages and nationalities, laughed, cried, and thoroughly enjoyed.
