New York Times review!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/arts/television/01watc.html?_r=1& ;oref=slogin
CENTER STAGE: TURN IT UP
Oxygen, Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times, 7, Central time.
It’s always fun to mock the Oxygen network, which was created in 1998 with highfalutin airs and big-name backers (Oprah Winfrey was one) and is now bottom-feeding with shows like “The Bad Girls Club” and “Snapped.” But Oxygen does try to wedge in better programming where it can, and Saturday’s “Center Stage: Turn It Up” is a case in point: a sweaty, sexy movie that is centered on ballet dancers, not the lap kind.
It’s basically an updated version of “Flashdance,” mixing hip-hop with classical ballet. Kate Parker (Rachele Brooke Smith) is a talented but self-trained dancer from Detroit who loses a position at New York’s American Ballet Academy to a wealthy patron’s daughter (Suzanne Von Stroh). Kate finds work in a nightclub and tries to make her own way with the help of another dancer, a former hockey player and fellow have-not, Tommy Anderson (Kenny Wormald).
Peter Gallagher, who played the Academy’s artistic director in the first installment, “Center Stage,” in 2000, returns in the same role, as does Ethan Stiefel, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, who plays Cooper Nielson, a star of the academy.
Some of the acting is stilted in spots, but the dancing is fantastic. And the leitmotif of class resentment is an apt one for the times.