"Happily ever after?" asks the shoemaker at the opening of the show. "We’ll see." And given that Nancy Harris’s adaptation sticks fairly closely to Hans Christian Andersen’s grizzly tale, it remains an open question.
A young girl who wants to dance falls in love with a pair of shoes, but having put them on cannot stop dancing or take them off. Either she will dance to death or must find another way out. So it doesn’t look good, not with that lad hanging about who likes playing with an axe. And what is more, Andersen, whose father was a cobbler, named the girl Karen after the sister he loathed.
Nevertheless, this is the RSC’s Christmas offering, so thankfully there is message of hope at the end, something to light this pudding.
Ballet dancer Nikki Cheung stars as an agile Karen, crashing crockery, catapulting cutlery into the guests, as she causes mayhem while dancing on the dinner table, and later performing an impressive routine a pointe. But fans of Strictly or of your average musical are likely to be disappointed. There is no dance ensemble, and it is asking a lot of your lead to put in a solo performance, largely without support, once even without music, and in a confined space. Cheung gives it everything, but it is not enough to save a dull show that never takes flight.
Harris’s script is as limp as last week’s lettuce, especially in a plodding first half devoid of magic. It seemed ironic that Karen’s adopted dad should promise to perform a conjuring trick, then fail to do it.
Dianne Pilkington and James Doherty are her adoptive parents, Mariella and Bob Nugent, a Merseyside version of the Wormwoods or the Dursleys from Matilda and Harry Potter, whom the dumbly obedient Karen learns to defy. Joseph Edwards is their axe enthusiast son.
Andersen's original fairy story, just a page or so long, might be read as a rebellion against convention and religiosity. It is hard to make out a message here, perhaps about doing your own thing, perhaps about the danger of doing just that, as Karen's actions contribute to the death of the family housekeeper Mags.
"Passion has its price," warns Sebastien Torkia’s shoemaker. As the vain Mariella spends so long staring into her magic mirror, I misheard it the first time as "Fashion has its price," which makes as much or as little sense.
There are a few good lines, in the shoemaker’s rhyming introduction, in his description of the fatal footwear as a ‘buy now, pay later’ sort of thing, and in the character of Prince—not royalty but named because his parents liked Purple Rain. But overall, this show is a mixed bag, a bit of dance, one (yes just one) song and a few cardboard characters, that fails to form a satisfying whole.