Fans of Universal’s Halloween dance shows like Nightmare Fuel and Academy of Villains can get their spooky season fix a few months early at Sam’s Skeleton Soirée, a high-energy live-action music video that was remotely written and produced by Samuel Spare all the way from Osaka, Japan. Spare nearly exhausted my good will before the show even got started with an endlessly self-indulgent introductory video of backstage thank-yous that should have been saved for the back of the program. That was followed by an unintelligibly echoey expository poem explaining that Skeleton Sam (Teddy Fournier) is cursed to crawl from the graveyard every Halloween and hold a ghoulish gala.
After almost 10 minutes of throat-clearing, the dancers finally took the Silver venue stage, which was set with a creepy castle backdrop designed by Eric Cantrell. The choreography by Spare and co-director Rhema Joy, which blends hard-hitting hip hop with balletic ballroom, is filled with sexy stylized violence and offers lots of visual variety, enhanced by the scarezone-worthy lighting design by Rowyn Sam.
The entire ensemble (Katarina DeCicco, Sylas Costa Jr., Raven Adrianse, Andrew Rodriguez, Kay Zumsteg, Nataniel “Nata” Alvira-Diaz, Megan Witte) is superb. But the show doesn’t truly kick into high gear until Fournier — who was also a highlight of Corsets & Cuties — shows up 15 minutes in as the title character to the strains of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare,” lushly rerecorded by Andrew Frye of Fryemixes. A tremendous dancer and magnetic stage presence, Teddy’s moves make his extremely competent castmates look like corpses with rigor mortis in comparison.
Not everything in this soirée is super; I abhor lip-syncing outside of drag shows, although this cast takes it more convincingly than many, and there should be a moratorium on Evanescence’s overused “Bring Me to Life” in horror dance shows. But my biggest problem is that the show is only 40 minutes, because I could have happily kept watching this decidedly un-Disney skeleton dance for far longer.
Sam’s Skeleton Soirée
Silver Venue, Orlando Family Stage
13 & up
$15
Get tickets
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This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.