Take the character of Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge and add the dress sense of The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly and you have something of a flavour of Ebony Scrooge.
This intriguing idea powers Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe’s reimagined hip-hop dance show for the excellent ZooNation, being premiered at Sadler’s Wells East. It’s grounded in the idea that for a Black woman to succeed in fashion she needs to be tough as nails – “hard as concrete”, as the narration has it.
So Leah Hill’s Ebony (pictured right), a magnificently powerful figure in heels and a sweeping leather skirt, is keeping her disgruntled employees behind on Christmas Eve, working on a monochrome runway collection. Then the ghosts of Christmases present, future and past appear – in that order – to make the tight-fisted fashionista see the error of her ways.
The story – told in voiceover and by two onstage commentators – sticks pretty closely to Dickens, though Bob Cratchit (the marvellous, soft-bodied, high-jumping Malachi Welch) is in love with Ebony, and it is Ebony’s orphaned niece Freddie (Portia Oti) who needs her attention and care.
The choreography, credited to Lecointe, Bradley Charles, Shakara Brown and the company, has plenty of high-energy attack and a lot of sophistication. It’s hard to resist the impact of the opening number in Christmas sweaters and tinsel, or the tight “tutting” of the workers tied to their benches, arms making geometrical patterns of containment and control. Michael “Mikey J” Asante’s score is lively and sharply attuned to different moods.
But there is a problem with how sparse the action looks on the great recesses of the stage. Jo Scotcher’s set is necessarily stark since the whole idea is that colour only returns to Ebony’s world when she has understood who she is, and where she comes from. But that leaves the action slightly stranded, while the impact of individual routines is disjointed.
There’s a wonderfully imaginative and light-filled passage in which, under the influence of the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ebony returns to her native Dominica and the stage is suddenly a mass of swaying, long-skirted action. Then a ship’s siren conjures Windrush and the action sketches her family life in England, up to the point where she holds a pink-blanketed Freddie in her arms. It has a fluency and a sense of purpose often missing elsewhere. Whenever Ebony is centre stage, Hill’s sheer presence offers a jolt of energy, her movement defined and purposeful. Smith has a gentle solo where she mourns the loss of a family; Welch’s longing for Ebony is conveyed in moves that tenderly rise and fall. These are all highlights.
In the main, however, characters aren’t much developed; it’s the power of the ensemble that carries the show. The result is winning and warm but never as expressive as hip-hop dance can be. It’s a good Christmas show, but never quite as exhilarating as its initial premise.
Ebony Scrooge is at Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 4 January