MIDNIGHT TANGO****

 

 By Imogen

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYTbnmcFBJA

Available until: It doesn’t say but probably Sunday 30^th November at about 7pm?

If anyone watches Strictly and they’re quite old they might remember when Vincent Simone and Flavia Cacace were professionals between 2006 and 2012. This is their show.

I think The Shows Must Go On chose to stream it because it’s called Midnight Tango and that sounds quite Halloweeny, but it’s actually not very Halloweeny at all. But I think that’s a good thing. Some people go a bit crazy over Halloween. The only thing I care about is having a better costume than anyone else and even that’s not much fun when we can’t go to parties. I kissed six vampires last year and two werewolves. But I refused to kiss the zombies.

I suppose it’s closer to a ballet than anything else. It’s a scene with lots of relationships between different characters which are shown through dancing and a bit of acting. But it’s not ballet music, it’s traditional tango music and all the characters dance Argentine tango. There are a lot of different pieces of tango music and the titles all come up on the screen.

It’s set in a late-night bar in Buenos Aries and it’s surprisingly respectable for a late-night bar. There are actually a lot of old people in it but they’re dressed decently. The people come into the bar and they order drinks, sit at tables and at some point they all get up and dance. There is a bit of conversation. It’s all in Spanish and so are the subtitles, but I don’t think they’re saying anything interesting. The words I could understand weren’t interesting anyway. It’s more about the dancing.

There’s not as much sparkle as you get on Strictly and some of the clothes are quite dull but some of them are really nice. Flavia obviously has the nicest dresses.

There are lots of different dancers. It’s mostly out of hold – the characters walk around in tango steps, sometimes it’s quite elabirate. There’s a bit of same-sex dancing too and there’s nothing wrong with that.

There is a small onstage orchestra with a very good violinist who didn’t make me cringe once. Some of the songs are very well-known and they have a really good Argentinian feel. It’s mostly tango but some of it is in a salsa direction but it’s quite respectable salsa, not really wild salsa. There’s also a waltz, but a very Latin one, and some other slow songs. A lot of the music is orchestral but some of it is sung. There is some really clever percussion too and I don’t usually pay much attention to percussion. There are some quite funny bits which the audience liked a lot.

Flavia and Vincent are obviously the stars. They get all the really fancy footwork and it’s really exciting and beautiful to watch. But there is a lot of really good dancing from everybody. Even the old people are good.