Stories - The Tap Dance Sensation Review ★★★★★

The plot is perfunctory, but boy, can they dance! The ten-strong ensemble of the RB Dance Company scorches the stage of the Peacock Theatre with dancing that never fails to thrill with its tightly choreographed blend of urban jazz and contemporary tap. Forget the rarified elegance of tap supremo Fred Astaire – this is high-octane visceral tap dancing, no less skilled, but much more immediate.

Add to that a fast moving, highly polished and visually stylish production and you have a very enjoyable show that more than justifies the raft of awards with which it’s been garlanded in its native France.

The story follows Icarus (Paul Redier), a successful young actor, who is kept in an artistic straightjacket by an authoritarian film director (Angel Cubero) in a plot that was surely inspired by the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film, The Red Shoes. Icarus’s love interest is a night club dancer (Lisa Delolme) with the remainder of the cast doubling as film crew, hotel bell boys and girls, hoodlums and so on.

The story evolves in short scenes, all pretexts for vibrant ensemble routines, and although it’s easy to follow, it doesn’t really matter too much. Nor is it involving – to put it bluntly, you don't much care what happens to the characters, so long as they keep dancing.

RB Company, Stories - The Tap Dance Sensation © Aline Gérard
Visually Stories owes a lot to 40s film noir, its predominant monochrome broken here and there by splashes of colour: a blood red dress for the night club dancer, burnt yellow for the bell boys’ uniforms (costume design Janie Louriault and Margaux Ponsard).

Federica Mugnai’s sets are functionally effective: essentially blocks of stairs that can be moved around to create various settings: an office, a dark alleyway, a night club, a film set. Omnipresent cigarettes and dense puffs of stage smoke, Alex Hardellet’s moody lighting and the occasional suspenseful blackout complete the atmospheric set up.

Romain Rachline Borgeaud, the show’s writer, choreographer, producer and director is also the composer of the soundtrack, a pulsating collection of percussive numbers over which a deep male voice provides a poetic narrative of sorts spoken in English. It's a little derivative, reminiscent of many things, but it does the job.

Stories premiered in France in 2019, following RB Dance Company’s success in the French version of the 'Got Talent' franchise. It subsequently toured France performing to sold out houses. The Peacock Theatre performances mark the first stage of an international tour.