Golden Eighties

Song, dance and romance charge this joyous hair-salon set musical, but Akerman’s take on 80s consumerism is anything but frothy.

You can almost smell the hairspray in Akerman’s exuberant but subversive musical about the many romantic entanglements of salon workers in a shopping mall basement. Its natty 1980s style, witty song lyrics, rapturous dance sequences, not to mention a gloriously bitchy male-suited quartet, deliver all the joys of the genre.

At the same time, Akerman critiques the consumerist ‘paradise’ around them, questioning whether love, if it’s tied to conformity, really is the answer.