Well, this is random and convoluted.

But the new girl in Hustle who sounds, acts and occasionally looks so much like Georgina Hagen decided to become an actress after seeing Starlight Express when she was 12. That would have been 1991, which is... hey, that's the year Georgie was born!

Weird. And I feel I should stop referring to her by nickname since I do not know her.

I feel like emailing the beeb and pointing out that if they ever need Emma to have a younger sister or cousin, there's an ideal teenager out there.

Like I say, Edward Scissorhands. It's supposed to be about the choreography.

Edward Scissorhands

Live singers for the ‘oohs’. Nice, but… why?

Putting all the suburbanites into groups of 4 really aids the exclusion of Edward. They’re already in their uniform groups – there’s no place for a fifth in any of them.

As does the whole segment of the pool/BBQ party about use of hands with the beach ball and sun lotion.

Melting snow! Genius! Front of House must praise the inventor of that every show that they don’t have to clean up confetti.

Heh! Those are just regular Capezio dansneakers!

Interesting casting. Every principal is alternately ensemble.

Use of main theme is sparing, which really aids its impact.

So clever coming up with all that handsfree pas de deux.

Forced perspective strangely true to the movie, despite there not really being any in it. It’s the same sort of quirk. Much like the Nutcracker set, really. Funnily enough.

It’s non-balletic movements somehow being done as ballet. Like the grammar remains, and the vocabulary has been swapped with that of another language. It has the discipline and quality of ballet, but with different lines and shapes.

Limiting the use of the main Edward Scissorhands theme really increased its emotional impact.

The handsfree pas de deux had more impact than the scissors free one – it was more clearly in context, and using imagination to overcome the limitation of having deadly blades for fingers.

Themes from the film we re-worked and expanded, including Edwards inability to hold his drink. Rather than fortified lemonade from Mr Boggs though, it was the teenagers that kept getting him drunk for a laugh. Where in the film the teenagers having been camping up the mountain was a device to keep Kim out of the picture until after the rest of her family had met and accepted Edward, here it is how they find Edward in the first place – in a distinctly Bat Boy ‘dudes! What is it?’esque way, of kids high on dope and adventure exploring the unknown and finding someone very unexpected.

The whole show was a bit fragmented, though.

There wasn’t really a clear turning point – where in the film the mob turns on Edward after Joyce’s bungled seduction, on stage that was just a vignette that didn’t really do any more than establish her as a sexual predator and her husband as oblivious.

The story is shifted from being the story of a Frankenstein’s Monster left unfinished to a cautionary tale about the dangers of playing with scissors when there’s a thunder storm raging. Don’t do it – you will get struck by lightning, you will die, and your grief-maddened father will recreate you out of bits of scrap leather with scissors for hands as a testament to how you died in the first place. Which you will then accidentally kill him with. And when the mob eventually descend on you, at your own grave, you will disappear leaving only the original pair of scissors that electrocuted you behind.

I wasn’t convinced by the reactions of the mischievous teenagers when they discover Edward – it may be just me, but if I’d gone up a foreboding mountain to explore a dilapidated Gothic mansion and antagonise it’s owner with my friends at Halloween, and run into a patchwork man with great long stabby blades on the ends of his arms, I don’t think I’d carry on larking around breaking windows and pulling faces at him. I would run. And probably change trousers. The kids here seem to make fun of him for a while, then declare that he’s no fun any more, and flounce off seeking further entertainment elsewhere.

The bits of Terry Davies’ score that aren’t re-workings of the Elfman theme sounded completely original. This gave the whole show greater variety, when the haunting melody that brings a tear to so many eyes could have worn thin and gone flat if it had been used exclusively. To me their inclusion was a bit odd – they didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, but neither did they blend seamlessly in they way they would have if, say, Stiles and Drewe had turned their hands to the project. It was a bit like they were the other side of a coin you didn’t know HAD two sides.