The tour kicked off on Friday evening. Here's a
review from the Daily Mail, which is an epitome of Fail 'journalism'.
My mother and I went to the Saturday evening show at Wembley and it was a really entertaining show. A bit cheesy and nostalgic, but we were there for the nostalgia. Despite my years of ubering Grishuk & Platov, Torvill & Dean are still my second favourite team, and they were my skating first love and their first 'farewell' tour in 1995 was my first live skating experience.
Overall, the show has high production values, seamlessly choreographed through, great costumes, lighting etc. It felt a bit of a throwback in style to older T&D tours with big thematic ensemble numbers and highlight moments for individual cast members within the larger numbers. But I don't think anyone in the audience was looking for anything groundbreaking - the Mr Void pretentious artiste years are long past.
And in this case the linking theme for the whole show was a retrospective of T&D's career, from teaming up as teens in the 1970s, though Olympic glory to reality TV cheese. So we had thematic numbers based around Mack and Mabel (silent movies - no-one wore a gold unitard), Barnum (circus) and Let's Face The Music and Dance (jazz era). There was also an 80s number (because that's when T&D were at their peak / Chris was watching last seasons' RDs while planning the show), a reworking of the Planets (Holst) number from one of their early pro tours (
that they gave Jupiter / I Vow To Thee My Country to Vanessa James), and a cheesy but fun cowboys/cowgirls number starting with a reprise of the (in)famous A Little Less Conversation number from Stars on Ice.
The only solos outside the thematic numbers were James & Radford (choreographed by Mark Hanretty), Mirai Nagasu, Philip Warren (the crowd loved a backflip - or seven, backflip-backflip combo, backflip over Mirai...), Bekker & Hernandez (who weren't in any of the emsemble numbers) and Torvill & Dean (Bolero of course).
Things I particularly enjoyed:
- Torvill and Dean skated more than I was expecting. They didn't have any long solos but they were on ice a lot and had highlight moments in all the main numbers. Chris told the story about how it wasn't possible to cut Bolero down to below 4:28 for the billionth time, but they've got a much shorter version for this tour. Obviously they can't do everything they used to (and she looked a bit stiff in the upper back), but it wasn't just nostalgia that make them still good to watch: performance, skating skills, lots of footwork in hold, still doing mini-lifts in keeping with their era of skating.
- Possibly my favourite number was early on: Torvill & Dean started out skating their Summertime Blues OSP and then Komatsubara & Koleto took over with a modern interpretation. The OSP translated really well to T&D's current skillset, and KoKo's performance was elegant and emotive, maintaining the callback to the original number but with contemporary lifts and choreo moves. KoKo seem to be thriving as pros and its nice to see.
- Mirai Nagasu! Mirai was fab; she's got such great presence, whenever she was on the ice she just drew my attention. Landing more jumps than the rest of the cast combined, beautiful spirals, great spins with beautiful positions, quickstepping with backflip guy Philip Warren - Mirai can do it all.
- The last time I saw Vanessa James skate live was at the British Championships in the 2005-6 season, so I had been looking forward to finally seeing her again. James & Radford didn't disappoint; very dynamic skating, great performance and connection, and the most power from their stroking of any of the pros. They seem a great fit for pro skating and have added some adagio tricks, but short on the overhead lifts - I guess his back may still be bothering him - and their pairs elements weren't firing in the first half (scary novice-esq single twist). And on a shallow note, they're an incredibly good looking team. I know I'm not the target audience, but whoever had the idea for Eric Redford to skate to Relax in a costume straight from the video plus studded dog collar - well done.
- There was a noticeable difference in skating skills between the skaters who had competed at elite level and the DOI pros, but the adagio pairs brought a lot to the ice too. Just really experienced show performers, good at bringing the ensemble together and at working a crowd, eye-catching tricks that the audience loved.
- My mother's favourite was Bekker & Hernandez, who did an adjusted version of their James Bond FD. But tbh Phebe could have come out and done crossovers to the Muppet Show theme for three minutes and it would likely have been her favourite. I enjoyed it, but I've seen the competitive version live a couple of times. If the timing relative to Worlds had worked out it would have been nice to see them with a new programme. I'd have liked to have seen them rework a T&D programme, maybe the paso doble OSP, in a similar approach to KoKo's Summertime.
What was not so good:
- There's a lot of Chris Dean talking about how great Chris Dean is. The structure of the show called for narrative (some was pre-recorded video and some was on ice with microphones) but time has not dimmed his ego and it would have benefitted from some judicious editing. After the final bows he acknowledged people say he tends to hog the microphone - and then he talked some more.
- Dean running through the list of great skaters he'd choreographed for felt disrespectful: "French ice dancers who went on to win Olympic gold", "more French ice dancers who won Olympic gold". Use their names, Chris! Also factually incorrect: "a French pair team who won Olympic gold" was presumably Savchenko & Massot. And no mention of the Duchesnays.
- Also boo that he didn't mention any of the British skaters he's choreographed for. More Kerrs and Coomes & Buckland erasure.
- They jumped very quickly from teaming up to the 1981-82 season - no mention of their early competitive experience or even their first world title. And the only thing they said about their first Olympics was how bad their costumes were. It wasn't groundbreaking, but I like that FD.
- Many of my favourite T&D pro-numbers didn't even show up in the scrolling images on the in-arena screens: Tilt, Oscar Tango, Missing... Nevermind, Encounter (my all time favourite pro ice dance number) is still on YouTube.
- Mark Hanretty is sadly underused. He's partnered with Annette Dytrt and they're just not a good match. They have a short threes number with (I think) Dan Whiston and are in an exceedingly cringe Dancing On Ice skit. It's a shame they couldn't give him a little solo dance moment and show off his beautiful extension.
- I'd also have liked the child skaters playing young Torvill and Dean (we got Isla Forsyth and Lewis MacDonald, who I've seen compete in novices) to have had a longer number. They had to spend a few minutes standing and looking at each other while Chris yapped on, then skated for about 20 seconds, then didn't even come back for the curtain call.
- Neither of us had ever been able to make it though a series of DOI so the DOI section and the run though of every D list celeb to win really dragged (there seemed to be a lot of fans around us who were really into it though). I hope Olivia Smart was having fun at Coachella while her face was being projected the height of Wembley arena.
- Programme was £15 and there's no show list
Also whoever wrote the bios for Bekker/Hernandez and Vaipan-Law/Digby clearly did some random googling and doesn't follow competitive skating at all. It told us that Digby came second at the 2018 Torun Cup and Hernandez trained under Philip Poole before he partnered with Emily Brown, but nothing about either team competing at European and World Championships.
- Wembley is on every metric the inferior London arena.
Overall, we had a great evening and really enjoyed the show - apparently I have so much to say about it that now I've written an essay.... But it was really fun; so much so that we booked to go again at the final run in Nottingham (even though Phebe won't be there).
And when the tour is over Jayne should give Gabby Papadakis a call and go listen to some feminist slam poetry at an open mic night.
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