Every year the Ensemble theatre stages one of its main productions at the Sydney Opera House’s Playhouse Theatre. This year’s is American playwright Richard Alfieri’s ‘Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks’. Alfieri’s play is a two hander, directed by Ensemble Artistic Director Sandra Bates, and starring two of our finest performers, Todd McKenney and Nancye Hayes.

Nancye Hayes plays Lily Harrison, a widow of mature age who has retired to Florida. With time on her hands she has decided to invest some money and time in taking some dance lessons from a popular local dance school. Todd McKenney plays Michael Minetti, her dance tutor, a witty, cynical gay guy. Over the course of the lessons there are some fireworks between the couple as they learn some new things about themselves and each other.

This Ensemble production was a good example of well produced, audience pleasing, mainstream theatre. The play had a good, clean structure, encased, as it was, within the course’s time frame. The tone wasn’t dreamy; in fact it was, authentic and, at times, harsh. Lily and Michael have both been around, and don’t pull any punches.

The play’s strongest aspects were the two good character studies and some incisive one liners. A favourite was; Michael: What kind of deceptive disease is this that leaves you looking healthy and vibrant to which Lily responds ‘What leaves me looking healthy and vibrant is Max Factor’.

Sandra Bates’s direction was clear, and focused on bringing out the strengths of the two accomplished actors. Both performers had their characters down pat, Hayes’s bored, gruff widow who comes out of her shell and Mckenney’s gay dance instructor whose outward bravado and charm hides a lonely heart.