Stage Review - Dance With Me (Dare to Dance Theatre/Theatre Off Jackson)
Stage Review - Dance With Me
Presented By: Co-Production from Dare to Dance and the Theatre Off Jackson - Seattle, WA
Show Run: August 01 - August 23, 2025
Date Reviewed: Saturday, August 02, 2025
Run Time: 2 Hours, 30 Minutes (including a 12-minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Tucker Cholvin
Tracy Turnblad riding a garbage truck to school. Maria Von Trapp and assorted children frolicking around Salzburg dressed in drapes. Dolly Levi sauntering down the stairs of the Harmonia Gardens in a red dress. The best American musicals, whether on stage and screen, are instantly recognizable, largely because of the powerful emotions they inspire. But can a show reach the same heights of emotion and spectacle through dance alone? Dance With Me, an original co-production from Dare to Dance Seattle and Theatre Off Jackson, aims to take up that challenge, presenting a new “dancical,” where characters erupt into dance instead of song.
Dance With Me’s story follows a young dancer, Helix, as they navigate grief and complex emotions in the wake of their mother’s death, as well as a blossoming romance with Ari, their teammate on their dance troupe (the production relies on two casts, and the genders of actors and the characters they portray vary.) Zhang Wang, who wrote and directed the piece, stressed in remarks before Monday’s performance that the piece is not autobiographical. Still, it is hard to imagine that many of the painful emotions that the piece excavates are anything but drawn directly from lived experience.
Dance With Me is ambitious. With a two-hour-and-thirty-minute runtime and a list of dance numbers that careens with Moulin Rouge-like variety from Britney Spears to Vivaldi to Sinead O’Connor, Wang attempts to pack a lot into one production. He also takes up topics like neglect, grief, abuse, belonging, love, guilt and intergenerational trauma all at once, with characters navigating these emotions seemingly by the minute.
This is a particularly tall order for the show’s leads, Hailey Bender and Lexi Warden, who sometimes struggle to fully embody these incredibly heady emotions during dialogue and dance. One standout, however, was Elizabeth Dilley in her dual roles as Helix’s mother and aunt, who portrays these emotions with a commitment and fullness that dominated every scene she appears in. (Helpfully, she is also a dead ringer for Bette Davis.)
Much like characters breaking into song in a musical, when Dance With Me’s characters burst out dancing, it is because they are brimming with emotion that cannot be expressed in words. The choreography is diverse, reflecting its talented and broad group of ten choreographers. Many of the production’s numbers rely heavily on narrative dance to develop the plot, but its dancing is most exuberant and vibrant when it is liberated from the storyline. A dance competition sequence near the end of the show ratchets the energy in the small theatre up to eleven, with audience members shouting for more. In these numbers where they are allowed to dance as hard as they can, the cast is totally captivating. Mikey Dela Cruz is particularly enjoyable here, seemingly having the time of his life on stage and building on the audience’s energy.
At every moment, Dance With Me presents an incredibly earnest account of the complex relationships between parents and children, falling in love, and the difficulties of both. But this sincerity comes at a price: the production is perhaps twice as long as necessary, largely because Wang seems unable to resist the urge to include as much in as possible. But if whittled down, at its core is a deeply honest love letter that rings true.
Dance With Me, the co-production from Dare to Dance and the Theatre Off Jackson, runs on stage through August 23. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://daretodanceseattle.org/.
Photo credit: EB4photography and Xavier Diaz
