When many of your colleagues are calling Footloose one of the worst musicals ever staged, it's difficult to pipe up and say, "hey, I liked it," but that's my duty the day after catching Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie's stage-musical adaptation of the 1984 hit flick. Hating Footloose would have been easy, since there was no reason on God's green earth to do this show, except to make money, to offer yet another amusement park-ish entertainment on Broadway, rather than a legitimate attempt to do something new, interesting or meaningful. When the youthful cast bounded onto the stage (shades of Big, a superior show but also another attempt to lure a middle-American, Stepford audience that may not actually exist), Footloose seemed to promise nothing but noise, phony high school wisecracking and lights shining right into my eyeballs. Shrill and overzealous as the piece is, and unmemorable as nearly all the songs are (including the movie tunes), damned if the show doesn't hook you in. The story of a happy-go-lucky visitor to a small town where dancing is banned because of a car accident years before makes not a whit of sense in its plotting, but, surprisingly, its themes and emotions hit home. Other critics no doubt gave up on a show that expected them to believe a preacher would condemn an innocent dance party but allow his daughter to dress like a tramp and let motorcycle-riding greasers behave like hoodlums at the Burger Blast.
Other reviewers undoubtedly couldn't get past the illogical point that the new kid in town confesses in the second act that he needs to get a school dance going to establish his credibility -- though by then he seems not only surrounded by friends and well-wishers, he's almost their leader. Footloose's inconsistencies are not to be ignored, but neither is the emotional soliloquy delivered by the Reverend (Stephen Lee Anderson), which does exactly what such an 11 o'clock number (actually, 10 o'clock) should: takes the character into a breakthrough and moves us while doing so.
The marketing of Footloose will surely concentrate on the energetic performers and love story between Jennifer Laura Thompson and Jeremy Kushnier -- the latter an agile and appealing newcomer. However, the musical ultimately works because the preacher's journey of self-discovery is both convincing and universal. At least there, Footloose keeps one foot solidly on the ground.
