“We’re in the money” – Dance on Broadway

**Dance on Broadway** (Ubisoft, Nintendo Wii)

Of Just Dance, I said “Nothing to top the charts has looked so barebones a proof of concept since the days of PS1 3D and Cool Boarders, and Cool Boarders actually worked”. For Ubisoft Just Dance was not just a success but a success with massive potential. Barely more than six months later they proved the point by spinning out another cheap proof of concept and making that a bestseller too, reaching the top of the individual formats chart for three weeks over a slow summer.

Thanks to the cunning change of title, I assumed at a glance that Dance on Broadway was someone else capitalising on a burgeoning trend, but it is a sequel in all but name. You listen to songs and copy the movement of dancers on screen, with some additional prompts from dance move logos, and get rewarded somewhat erratically by points. There are no big developments from Just Dance, no new modes or significant options. To be fair, again, barely six months had passed.

There are, though, two things which separate it from Just Dance. The largest new element is the choice of music. Once again familiarity is the name of the game, but this time it’s through sourcing from the world of musical theatre. A not especially generous 21 songs from 16 musicals are included, from Gold Diggers of 1933 to The Lion King. As with Just Dance, the emphasis on the well-established means a lack of recent material, with 2002’s Hairspray the newest. No Avenue Q, no Billy Elliott, no Spring Awakening. What it does have is a bunch of songs which can fit that role of everyone at your party knowing them, while lending themselves more obviously to choreographed dancing.

The other change follows on from that one. Just Dance’s flat neon presentation is replaced with four 3D dancers for each song, on stage with props and even sometimes background dancers. These are not exactly intricate or remarkable. The dancers are rather stiff, the settings bland. The pleasure of the camera panning over theatre seats at the beginning to make its way to the stage quickly runs out once it’s clear it’s the same for every song. Presenting a realistic physical space is another development in what this model of game can do, though, however small it is.

I’m not a big musical theatre fan, even if my five-year-old currently has us watching Matilda the Musical several times a week. The minimal sense of presenting a performance already makes Dance on Broadway a better showcase for its music than Just Dance, getting me appreciating “My Favorite Things” anew (and newly noting a resemblance in Super Mario Galaxy’s sublime Gusty Garden Galaxy score).

It works to think about the music and the show partly because the dancing feels no more involved than it did in Just Dance. It’s a case of doing some moves while watching a performance, not feeling like being in that performance. Which makes sense. Just Dance never set out to make players feel like pop stars, but to replicate the appeal of communal dancing at the club. While JLS were valiantly attempting to bring The Sound of Music to the club, that wasn’t a model for a whole game. Vaguely involved audience member would do.