Old Broadway musicals sometimes used to have a classical interlude, in which some imported legend from the Ballets Russes would be hired to stamp the production with a mix of exoticism and artistic integrity.
It almost always fell flat. The dancer was clearly slumming for a payday, and the producers had no idea how to match her talents with music that the audience could hum. Derek Deane's triumph with Strictly Gershwin for English National Ballet is to have taken a type of scene that never worked, and expanded it into a show that does.
The best numbers feel like ballet daydreaming that it might be something else. In Shall We Dance, Begoña Cao does a mercurial impression of a Ginger Rogers quickstep, despite performing much of it on point. Erina Takahashi - one of the most unaffectedly captivating dancers around - appears twice, in a haunting boy-meets-girl encounter with the whiplash Zdenek Konvalina during Someone to Watch Over Me, and then leading the chorus-line meets corps-de-ballet of Rhapsody in Blue.
Strictly Gershwin's various cocktails may be intoxicating but served straight the ingredients fall a little flat. The tapdancing of guest artists Paul Robinson and Douglas Mills is accomplished but hardly gobsmacking, until ENB's Kerry Birkett joins them to make an instantly more combustible mixture in Lady Be Good. Meanwhile, The Man I Love could almost be a parody of balletic clichés - you want to shout at Elena Glurdjidze: "Why do you keep running away from him, and then running back?"
There are also too many distractions. A screen behind the band shows images of Fred Astaire and other musical-comedy greats but also indiscriminately portrays icons from Bogart to Louise Brooks, as if someone had just Googled "glamour" and fed all the results into a slide show. And conductor Gareth Valentine wiggles about on his podium with so little grace or restraint that even the orchestra spends part of the evening trying to ignore him.
Until Jan 15 (0871 911 0200, eno.org)
English National Ballet: Strictly Gershwin
London Coliseum
St Martin's Lane, WC2N 4ES
