Yesterday I saw the English National Ballet's new production, Strictly Gershwin, at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool. I love ballet, and was excited to see some of my favourite dancers again, especially Erina Takahashi who partnered with Zdenek Konvalina for Someone to Watch Over Me and with Esteban Berlanga for The Man I Love . The dancers were wonderful, the costumes were gorgeous...but did the choreography quite work? Gershwin was never meant to be twee, and unfortunately the show sometimes felt stilted and unadventurous, particularly with Rhapsody in Blue where the dance bore no relation at all to the story told by the music which, for that piece, was played in a lacklustre manner by the orchestra. The orchestra formed a large part of the backdrop for the performance. Perhaps this could have been exploited to greater visual effect, so that soloists might have been picked out by a spotlight - hardly a groundbreaking method of allowing the audience to see more clearly wh