No critic has so far mustered the titular enthusiasm for Yippeee!!! at Sadler's Wells, created by Lea Anderson for her two dance troupes, the all-female Cholmondeleys and the all-male Featherstonehaughs, and inspired by Busby Berkeley's 1930 creation, Whoopee!
To be sure, it lived up to its promised weirdness, with cast costumes which included trousers with an extra leg, pearls twinned with gas masks, plastic camiknickers with mice tails and flesh-coloured costumes detailing futuristic biological mutations. And the Guardian's own Judith Mackrell delighted in Anderson's surreal spin on her source material, where "Charlestoners chug in geometric formation; exotic tableaux are fringed with slowly fanning arms and legs; hands dance an exquisite kaleidoscope."
Unfortunately, she found the score a "cacophonous scrawl" which left the dancers "in a hellish vacuum", and for the Times' Debra Craine, it was so "mind-numbing" it "makes you feel like a nail being hammered into the wall... so without musical colour that you wonder how the dancers endure it."
It probably didn't help either that Mackrell thought the show was at least an hour too long, instigating "as much shuffling in the auditorium as there is on stage", or that for Craine, "the language of the choreography - demented and spasmodic - casts a sinister glow on the dancers, who seem knee-deep in self-deluded glory."
But the main difficulty, that even the more enthusiastic Sarah Frater for the Evening Standard couldn't avoid, was that this had all been done before, better: "The problem for Anderson, who has always thrived on sexual subversion, is that despite his Art Deco refinements, Berkeley was already loaded with it. Anderson makes the same joke, albeit with considerable aplomb."
Or as the Times' Debra Craine put it, Berkeley produced a musical at the onset of the Depression, "determined to be cheerful.... Anderson, inspired by Berkeley's choreographic exuberance, makes Yippeee!!!, a theatrical dance determined to be grim."
Still, it's early days yet, and someone may still get excited as Yippeee!!! tours Poole, Brighton and Cambridge. You, perhaps?
