I can’t recall the last time I saw anything as intensively inventive as this story of a couple of 1970s’ one-hit wonders struggling to cope with their decline and dreaming of a comeback, a doomed fantasy brought to life in a mesmerising one-hour mash-up of dance, theatre, mime, acrobatics, cabaret, clowning, music, film and aerial skills.
The show at the Albany was devised and performed by Laban-trained Eleni Edipidi and Nathan Johnston of the Levantes Dance Theatre and triumphantly succeeded in being at once funny, sad, exuberant, reflective, celebratory and elegiac in equal measure. The terrific soundtrack ranged from George Ezra’s ridiculously chirpy Cassy O to Connie Francis’s heartbreaking version of I’m Sorry I Made You Cry by way of a breathless take on Teach Me Tiger by April Stevens. But it was the breakneck performances of Edipidi and Johnston – who incidentally has the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen – that made this show so fantastic and created a multi-faceted, multi-sensory, multi-disciplinary melange of magic through their remarkable artistry and vision.