This drama about an underdog-understudy forced to clean studios has real ballet dancers but the story is less realistic than Angelina Ballerina
This saccharine drama pivots around aspiring ballerina Sam (Juliet Doherty), who we meet as she is about to go on stage to dance in a production of The Red Shoes (presumably a version of the Matthew Bourne ballet-drama). But in one of those dramatic twists of fate that would set even the Brothers Grimm’s eyes rolling, her sister Annie calls to wish her good luck seconds before she takes the stage – and then promptly gets hit and killed by a passing car.
Obviously, this rather ruins Sam’s big night, and she gives up on dancing altogether. She subsequently falls in with a teenage tearaway named Eve (Lauren Esposito) who, like Sam, is a young American living in Australia for reasons left inexplicably vague. A sequence of screenwriting contrivances wash Sam back up at her old dance academy, run by termagant dance mistress Miss Harlow (Carolyn Bock, a hoot), and Sam is compelled to wash the floors as a form of community service for a shoplifting offence. Whaddya know; before long she’s back in the toe shoes, taking over a role when mean-girl rival Gracie (Primrose Kern) is injured and it turns out only Sam knows the choreography.
