STEEL PIER Union Theatre

John Kander and Fred Ebb, the authors of Cabaret and Chicago, have taken their inspiration for their 1997 musical from the gruelling and degrading competitive dance marathons which jobless people, desperate for money, entered during the Great American Depression. Perhaps you may have read or seen the film version of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses Don’t They? The main story-line has a pilot, who died in an air crash, coming back from the dead to claim the “dance with a celebrity” prize which he had won in a raffle but had not been able to take up. The supernatural element is totally unnecessary. The show is flawed; but it’s very tuneful and Paul Taylor-Mills’s enjoyable production is enormously helped by the numerous drop-dead dance routines, so invigoratingly choreographed by Richard Jones.