Flip flop paradigm….

Jerry Springer of course magnificently tore down the citadels of one form of high art - opera - to satirise and celebrate the genre of confessional television, a form of low culture that’s famous for its variously appalled and appalling portraits of low life. Now Thomas audaciously enters another new arena - modern dance theatre, to satirise and celebrate an even more universal requirement and, for some, obsession: shoes. (Yes, Imelda Marcos does make an appearance).

We pretty much all wear them - even as I write this, I am wearing a pair of crocs (which make a brief reviled appearance here on video). But I don’t think about them a lot: they’re a practical necessity, not an item I spend hours slavering over. So maybe I’m not the target audience for this show (but then I wasn’t exactly a person who watched the real Jerry Springer or even Jeremy Kyle shows, though I must confess that I once upon a time was bizarrely drawn to the Robert Kilroy-Silk morning show for some reason….)

All of which is by way of avoiding the central problem of this Vegas-like floor show: there’s not much soul or soles to it — both are worn out by the relentless Duracell bunny energy of the dancers. Thomas has provided another richly eclectic and tuneful score, and as with Jerry Springer, it has been electrified by the glorious, gorgeous presence of Alison Jiear, but it’s all spectacle and no point; or at least it seems from what you can make out of it, since the lyrics are often muddied by the sound system.

Sadler’s Wells are no doubt hoping that this show has legs, in every sense; it is talking up a tour for next year. Certainly there’s a growing appetite for dance-based shows in general: just last weekend, West End seasons for Tap Dogs and Burn the Floor ended their limited runs, while Twyla Tharp’s latest dansical, Come Fly Away, set to the songs of Frank Sinatra, also closed on Sunday on Broadway. This coming weekend, of course, Strictly Come Dancing begins its 8th season on TV - with a strong theatrical connection provided by the presence in the line-up of none other than Felicity Kendal, swapping Stoppard for swing!

By coincidence, I was seated last night at Sadler’s Wells next to Simon Green, who reminded me that I once labelled him in a review as “the Felicity Kendal of musical theatre”. I was, of course, referring to his apparently ageless looks; not to what The Independent’s Paul Taylor once said about Kendal in a review of her performance as Arkadina in a production of The Seagull at the Old Vic: she “runs her usual gamut, all the way from ‘pert’ to ‘roguish’. With the dimpling Ms Kendal about as likely to deliver the part in Esperanto as risk alienating an audience, you feel more embarrassed about the wildly unsuitable wig inflicted on Michael Pennington’s Trigorin than you do about the mortifying painfulness of the central mother-son relationship.”