Stepping Out movie review & film summary (1991)

The movie translates the material to North America (the movie was shot mostly in Buffalo and Toronto), and "opens up" the story by showing us the private lives of many of the characters (Liza is married to a chauvinist pig, Sheila McCarthy is married to a wife-beater, etc.). This is a mistake. In the play, the tap class contained the entire world of the story, and members talked of offstage situations. To see the husbands and others takes away from the episodic rhythm of the classes, in which heartfelt discussions alternated with dance routines.

Liza Minnelli’s work in the movie is an appetizer for more singing and dancing. It’s a shame that a talent like hers has to survive in an era when the traditional film musical is all but dead.

She has a big solo production number and leads her class onstage for the big all-city dance extravaganza, but mostly she’s stuck in scenes of potted dialogue and emotion, chain-smoking and sympathizing.

Of the others in the class, Bill Irwin and Shelley Winters have particularly thankless roles, he as the pathologically shy male member of the group, she as a piano player with a perpetual grudge that the screenplay never pauses to explain. Sheila McCarthy (from "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing") is engaging as the defiant wife who wants out from under her husband’s control, and Nora Dunn has fun with the limited role of the local society shrew.

But the movie is neither fish nor fowl. As a song-and-dance picture, it talks too much. As a drama, it’s superficial and locked into a formula. Maybe it will remind somebody what a wonderful talent Liza Minnelli has, and they will do something with it, like putting her in a real musical.