IU – The Red Shoes

A woman who finds a pair of pink high heels on a subway platform soon realizes that jealousy, greed, and deranged musical theatre follow them wherever they go.

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[6.00]Anthony Easton: It’s too long, and the historical-minded nature of it doesn’t quite swing as elegantly as they think it does, but there is an attempt at elegance, and much of the vamping is skillful and sophisticated.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: A fun song, but the musical nature of it also comes off as a bit of a novelty.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: (Hoo boy.) This is either like a version of The Red Shoes where IU’s getting giddy with a big band, singing things like “I’m not sad, I will dance again,” where “dance” means dancing through life, not into hell; or the act-one finale of a dreadful Broadway adaptation where the dream ballet‘s full of mugging and chorus girls, and where someone’s spilled bleach on the shoes. The former is plausible, I guess (it’s basically the bridge of the Kate Bush song, without the grit or gallows whimsy); the latter is more like reality.
[5]

Iain Mew: “They say you can go to better places if you wear better shoes” is a superb line, just as easily read as whimsical or cynical. Elsewhere the lyrical relation to the Hans Christian Andersen original is largely tangential and IU can’t even keep the colour of the shoes straight, but she and the eagerly packed arrangement have a the carefree freedom of an endless summer and the edge of a suggestion that she just might get carried right away.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: IU’s surely a likeable lead, even when she blitzes through six musical opening numbers in four minutes without stopping for breath. It’s impressive and I’d go and see her in a K-pop musical in a second — but “The Red Shoes” makes me feel like I need to take a Ritalin.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: The lack of fidelity to the original text isn’t the problem — isn’t a problem at all, actually. The original’s class transgression, sexual fear, and confession gets watered down to a simpler story of nostalgia and resolution: well, that’s why they’re pink shoes here. The problem is that the musical structure wobbles between the “nostalgia” and the “resolution,” so that the swing beat wants to carry things along but the chorus wants to stop and wander around in keys I associate with the 1970s. A stronger voice might have imposed some personality on the package, but IU seems drowned out. The whole doesn’t work for me, except maybe as background for a Katamari Damacy level.
[4]

Brad Shoup: It’s a super-poignant text (could it be otherwise?) brought staggering to life via a budget big-band arrangement. Normally this kind of approach would give me hives, but I’ve been listening to some Don Fagen so I’m inoculated.
[6]