Passion, on ice, might sound a contradiction in terms but proves to be another irresistible cocktail shaken up and served for Blackpool’s annual ice show.
The resort’s Pleasure Beach has been dishing them up for seven decades now so there’s something of a magic formula involved, though just when you thought you’d seen it all along comes some startling new ingredient.
This year it has to be the sheer speed of a production featuring some two dozen of the world’s top ice skaters performing figure moves and routines at a blink-and-you-miss-it rate.
It can take your breath away as surely as one of the rollercoaster rides outside.
The level of technique and strength involved, and the gravity-defying nonchalance, comes almost for granted but then suddenly delivers up some astonishing new lift or acrobatic move.
It’s all dressed and choreographed to a Las Vegas floorshow standard with figure-hugging costumes that could well have been tattooed on. Even the smoke, mirrors, lights and lasers that open the show earn their own round of applause!
Producer and director Amanda Thompson, alongside choreographers Oula Jaaskelainen and Lynsey Brown, uses an eclectic suite of world music to create a range of styles and moods, with everything from a heavy metal rumble, through Celtic rock, to Polynesian, East European and Flamenco flavours.
Elsewhere a Salsa routine blends effortlessly into an Apache dance set, while the marimba rhythms of an old standard like Sway are used for a graceful dance duet.
The production has been neatly sliced into two contrasting acts so that one can be served up for the shortened afternoon matinées.
Either way it’s a sizzling ice spectacle that climaxes with either an indoor snow shower, or a hot bath... when acrobat Alexey Kofanov closes the full-length production with his now almost-traditional bathtime balancing act.