Ballet or Broadway? Sometimes you can’t tell with BalletX’s bright and colorful ‘Speakeasy’
It could've well worked as an evening-length work, but the evening also gifted the audience with Amy Hall Garner’s "Switching the Groove" and Christian Denice’s "In the Wake."
BalletX brought a bit of Broadway to the Suzanne Roberts Theatre Wednesday night, when it opened the world premiere of Loughlan Prior’s Speakeasy.
Glittering, sexy, and polished, Speakeasy is set 100 years ago in Prohibition-era Philadelphia. It includes a fun story, highly colorful, beautiful costumes and sets by Emma Kingsbury, and original music by Frank Moon. The dancing ranges from the Charleston to classical choreography. The dancers used their pointe shoes to both perform ballet steps and strut across the stage.
The inspiration for Speakeasy, Prior said before the piece, was his visit to Philadelphia bars in 2024, when he was here to choreograph Macaroni, another period piece set in Philly.
In Speakeasy, the dancers really stepped up their game in the acting department, led by April Watson playing an impossibly glamorous mob boss; Jonathan Monteparra as an undercover detective whose resolve begins to slip; Jared Kelly as the judge; and Ashley Simpson as the jazz singer.
Watson is one of four new dancers to the company this year, and is all long legs, strong technique, and personality.
The sets and costumes make the production seem like a fully realized musical, with bright colors and humor. The eponymous speakeasy itself is “hidden” in a giant liquor barrel that opens up like a dollhouse with dancers spilling out and spreading onto the stage.
» READ MORE: BalletX unveils its 2026-27 season, including a new ballet set in Prohibition-era Philadelphia
The speakeasy is allegedly situated in Philadelphia “a city as wet as the Atlantic in the midst of America’s dry Prohibition era,” the program notes say, but while we are told this, we are not shown it at all.
One factual error involves the judge’s costume, which includes a powdered wig. Prior is Australian and Kingsbury was born in the U.K. and grew up in Australia, and judges and lawyers still often wear wigs in parts of the British Commonwealth. Americans stopped wearing them after the Revolutionary War.
Speakeasy could’ve worked well as an evening-length work, but it shared the program with two works BalletX has performed in the past, Amy Hall Garner’s 2023 Switching the Groove, and Christian Denice’s 2025 In the Wake.
Switching the Groove is a celebration of various styles of dance, and it’s a soothing piece set to a variety of music by Rodrigo y Gabriela, Francesco Tristano, and Rami Khalife. The steps are at times impossibly fast, other times long and stretchy, and other times include bits of hip hop, and the dancers seamlessly change from style to style as the music changes.
Denice was a BalletX choreographic fellow when he created In the Wake to music by Philip Daniel, and it seems to have only gotten better in the years since. The dancers are all in shrouds in shades of grays (both this and the Hall Garner piece have costumes by Martha Chamberlain) and they move smooth as smoke through the scenes as mourners, reflecting, remembering, and somehow still looking impossibly cool.
In its 21st year, BalletX looked great in all three pieces, even when with so much action and theatricality, it was hard to pick out some of the new dancers to judge how they performed.
It’ll be interesting to watch them as the season goes on.
BalletX fall series. Through Nov. 15. Suzanne Roberts Theater. $55-$85, 215-225-5389 x250 or boxoffice@balletx.org
