The thrill of Speed - but only at 100 miles per hour
It’s only been nine months since Holiday On Ice was last at Westpoint with Robin Cousins‘ excellent Tropicana, but given the reception the latest spectacular, Speed, received last night, it has lost none of its appeal for Exeter audiences.
Much has been made in pre-publicity about the use of motorbikes in the show, so we went expecting a full-on evening of leather and two-stroke oil on ice - what we got was something completely different.
Speed is merely a premise around which the show is choreographed: each half has five distinctly separate pieces - Speed of Love, Speed of Nature, Speed of Thrill and so on - some of which work, some of which don’t.
In the quest to make each show more incredible, it seems, sometimes the essential point of Holiday On Ice seems to get lost: there’s a particularly odd piece of machinery which moves backwards and forwards on the ice bearing dancers aloft for no good reason. But when we have the Hawaiian section, the crowd goes wild for the giant inflatable beachballs thrown into the crowd by the skaters.
Each piece is introduced by a pneumatic blonde via the video screen, a slightly dislocating experience which tipped its hat to the opening credits of The Rocky Horror Show and had the people behind us muttering that this wasn’t perhaps suitable for small children.
Yet as a spectacle, Speed is a visual treat - as we have come to expect. The opening is a typical Holiday On Ice showstopper: Mad Max meets Duran Duran’s The Wild Boys using fire and pyrotechnics on the ice and on skates and the finale is equally impressive. The motorbikes, when they finally arrive, are fun - and setting light to the ice makes for an extraordinary sight.
There’s lots more interaction with the audience this time - the skaters even get to speak and Forrest Ryan McKinnon managed to ad lib seamlessly when the revolving cage stubbornly refused to descend from the Westpoint roof, thus robbing us of what promised to be an exciting ending to the utterly bizarre “Speed of Thrill” section.
The quality of Holiday on Ice’s skating stars is never in question, however: the Russian pair of Daria Perminova and Evgenii Belyanin are extraordinary and it was good to see a strong male line-up, including Rohene Ward and Mauro Bruni, who was making a welcome return to the cast for Exeter.
It’s no surprise that Holiday On Ice has broken world records on and off the ice - after 70 years of packed shows, they are still clearly doing something right. Speed, however, is slight misnomer, as lots of parts of this show are relatively slow (although speed is, of course, 5mph as well as 100mph) and a few people were shifting in their seats, but when it is good, it is jaw-droppingly excellent.
The show’s creators said they wanted to make this revolutionary, to marry concepts that had never been tried on ice before - such as the dancers - to the traditional Holiday On Ice concepts. Has it worked? Mostly. But go and see for yourself.
Speed is at Westpoint Arena until 18 November. For more information, or to buy tickets, see www.holidayonice.co.uk or telephone 0844 581 1314.
