Did the Critics Find Hot Feet a Shining Star of the Season?

The latest jukebox musical has hit the boards—the dance-driven Hot Feet, featuring the music of Earth, Wind and Fire—opened at the Hilton Theatre on April 30 after a poorly received out-of-town tryout. Did New York critics embrace this boogie wonderland?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "The idea of fashioning a musical from the '70s R&B group's hits isn't a bad one, and director-choreographer Maurice Hines' ensemble dance numbers often match the energy of Maurice White's songs. The trouble comes when the cast stops strutting and starts speaking… Hot Feet doesn't borrow only from The Red Shoes both the Hans Christian Andersen story and the Michael Powell film. [Librettist Heru] Ptah also throws in characters from Faust and Showgirls. The result is a hackneyed, utterly predictable story that drags down the show."

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times: "[Hot Feet] is a dancing encyclopedia of clichés culled from tattered tales of dreamy-eyed youngsters seeking fame and fortune in showbiz. Awkwardly lurching between frenzied, uninspired dance sequences and listless stock scenes of turmoil backstage, it is about as gripping as a two-and-a-half-hour episode of Soul Train."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "Maurice Hines' dance-ical Hot Feet, which limped enthusiastically into the Hilton Theatre last night, is barely lukewarm… [Nixon] shines though the murk of Hines' repetitive and tedious Las Vegas-style and that's being pretty tough on Las Vegas choreography… In what is fundamentally a dance show, the real liability is the dance and the dancers. Michael Balderrama as the hero, or at least the heroine's love interest, is not especially gifted in the dance department, while Wynonna Smith, good for intentional laughs, is hardly credible dancewise as the lead dancer who Kalimba eventually supplants."

David Rooney of Variety: "With its smoke-filled prisms of iridescent laser light and rickety, minimal set, the show looks disconcertingly cheap for an $8 million Broadway enterprise. Only the robotic stormtrooper costumes for the climactic Hot Feet ballet—which has suggestions of Metropolis but otherwise has no discernible narrative arc—are in any way elaborate. The bland presentational style harks back to shows like Soul Train, Dance Fever and Solid Gold, with audition and rehearsal scenes that ape the vocabulary of A Chorus Line or the opening of All That Jazz. Nixon daughter of Debbie Allen is a graceful mover with evident classical training and a gorgeous smile, but it requires a far more resourceful actress to make anything of this wooden dialogue or to generate sparks with Balderrama."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Hot Feet. Cold plot. There's a story connected to this exhausting new dance musical created by director and choreographer Maurice Hines to the music of Earth, Wind and Fire, but it's best not to think too much about it. In fact, the lame tale, loosely adapted by Heru Ptah from Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, trips up this hyper-kinetic show… That's too bad, because Hines has assembled a large and talented cast of dancers… They operate on a different, more accomplished plane than the musical's crude, cautionary yarn."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "I found myself, after a recent preview, wondering why I hadn't just stayed home and listened to some of the band's golden oldies. This new production certainly isn't a disaster on the order of Lennon or All Shook Up. Hines, who also directs Feet, has a vibrant young cast led by the briskly athletic Vivian Nixon as Kalimba… [The book] combines an obvious plot with a befuddling message, and is so corny and convoluted that it makes Mamma Mia! seem like a lost Chekhov text in comparison… The songs are performed competently, though without the wind and fire of the original tracks, by an orchestra with vocalists."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "[Hot Feet] lacks the originality to match its considerable ambition. Despite a hard-working cast of hard-bodied dancers and the fusion rhythm-and-blues appeal of Earth, Wind & Fire, this urban update of The Red Shoes is just another gotta-dance retread with classroom steps and street attitude… There simply isn't enough charm in the story, narrative momentum in the music or individual voice in the choreography to feed the demands of a full-length dance musical."