It can feel like a long, lonely Spring and Summer without Strictly for fans of the hit BBC show. But Strictly Come Dancing - The Professionals, puts the swing, or a host of other fabulous dances anyway, into the season with its glitz, glamour and general gorgeousness.
Featuring 11 dancers, including Strictly Come Dancing choreographer-cum-dancer Arduino Bertoncello, the show includes all of the drama and beauty audiences have come to adore, premiering at The Lowry in Salford this week. Highlights include a tantalisingly tempestuous tango featuring a suitably sassy Luba Mushtuk in the most covetable outfit ever.
The James Bond themed section is also breath-taking, Graziano did Prima, Kai Widdrington and Neil Jones injecting a marvellous helping of manliness into proceedings as the ladies melt like butter into their arms. If only we all collapsed so elegantly after a night out dancing.
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We get some mini biographies of the dancers too, which, frankly, feel a little too cheesy and at times make the show feel more about the dancers than the dances. Substituting these bits for potted histories of the tango, the Charleston, the salsa and the samba would be more interesting and, for all its crazy delightfulness, would give the show a bit more structure.
The script needs updating a bit too. "Haven't you missed holidays?" the audience is asked, even though most people are long since back into the swing of going abroad after travel restrictions eased. Luckily though, these things are brief enough not to affect the show's flow too much.
Strictly is not only for adults and the dancers prove this with a fun Disney themed section, requiring yet another set of fabulous costumes. How the dancers change so quickly into outfits that are hardly the kind of things you just throw on defies belief, and they don't have a hair out of place!
The band are extremely impressive too. Singers Tara McDonald and Patrick Smyth show astonishing versatility as well as enviable vocal talent in their repertoire, segueing effortlessly from 90s dance hits to Tones and I's Dance Monkey, from Bond themes to Disney tunes.
There's a bit of a tearjerker moment when the Strictly ladies dedicate a dance to all the mums in the audience at the end, with images of them with their own mothers on the screen as they float across the stage, visions in white.
This is a well placed change of pace to the frenetic fabulousness of the rest of the show, a fabulousness that almost gets lots in the frenzy at times.
Dance fans may have liked a little more organisation to the show but dedicated Strictly fans are sure to love it. The production heads off on a nationwide tour after Salford including to Cardiff, Sheffield, Hull, Liverpool and Birmingham.
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