Footloose

Type: Musical

Score: 5.5/10

Date modified: Aug 7, 2026

A quick disclaimer, I watched this in the form of a high school musical so I’m not 100% sure how well this would reflect the actual movie or a professional musical. I also won’t be revealing where I watched this as I’m not trying to doxx myself so my thoughts here will be pretty much meaningless to everyone, therefore I’ll make them short. I came in with pretty low expectations and came out feeling mixed but having had a good time. Ariel’s actor was pretty pitchy, but aside from that I thought they were all pretty good. Specifically the actors playing Ren, Rusty and even the guy playing the Reverend (though I’m told he didn’t even have any songs in the original movie). The Reverend in general was absolutely fantastic and managed to make the most of his pretty cliche character arc and managed to become the emotional linchpin of the musical.

Unfortunately story-wise there were some serious pacing issues with this, it was the same length as the original Footloose movie and yet was written at such breakneck pace that it was kind of confusing at points. I’m sure this was in large part because it was a play and I’m not here to suggest that I could’ve written it better but surely more could’ve been cut to make pivotal moments not last seconds. Like the first five minutes felt like at least 30 minutes of content was mashed into it. It’s whatever and it kind of wasn’t much of a problem in the second half but it still irked me a little. The other reason my rating is so low is just that the dialogue was often either delivered poorly or just poorly thought out. They gave the Reverend all the good lines and then called it quits, fucked up.