‘What began life for radio – composer Dominic Muldowney’s The Voluptuous Tango won a Prix Italia in 1997 – has now been transformed into very effective music theatre. Muldowney’s exploration of a fictional encounter in Paris in 1932 between the Italian futurist and fascist Filippo Marinetti and the dancer Isadora Duncan uses the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen as its musical starting point, but then gradually expands to take in other tangos as the emotional temperature rises and the confrontation reaches its literal and metaphorical climax. The text by David Zane Marowitz is very funny. Marinetti plies Isadora, who is hunting for a genius to father her next child, with recipes from his Futurist Cookbook. Their conversation switchbacks from mussels to Mussolini, but the dancer is repelled, and after the gastronomic foreplay Marinetti resorts to the Futurist Manifesto of Love-Making with equally unsuccessful results. There’s a lot of speech, but Muldowney also gives both of them set-piece songs,numbers which hover between Eisler and Sondheim.
The staging uses the electronic soundtrack realized by Ian Dearden, with its collages of tangos and street noises, which formed the basis for the radio version but the voices – Marinetti, Duncan and a male chorus of four, who represent Marinetti’s unspoken thoughts – are live; Di Trevis’ production also added a pair of dancers who act out the manoeuvrings between the ill-matched couple. It was brilliantly realized – Richard Morris as a transcendentally arrogant Marinetti, Jenna Russell as Isadora, with Nicholas Johnson and Isabel Baquero as the poker - faced dancers – and a lot of fun too; Muldowney and Trevis have transformed The Voluptuous Tango in a theatre piece that will wear very well.’The Guardian (Andrew Clements)