ZooNation -Unplugged, Sadler's Wells, Review After a lucrative summer spent hosting the modern classic and all-round coach party-magnet that is West Side Story, Sadler's Wells's autumn season kicked off on Tuesday. Forthcoming attractions will include a Christmas revival of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and six British premieres from the legendary Mark Morris (November 27 - December 1) but for the moment we had Unplugged, a two-night stand by hip-hop phenomenon ZooNation devised and directed by one of the theatre's Associate Artists, Kate Prince. The 39-year-old Prince has had a busy few years of stage, screen and arena dancemaking and was recently signed up to choreograph next February's talent-packed Harry Hill X Factor spoof I Can't Sing, directed by Sean 'Lavender Hill Mob" Foley. Unplugged has a fair amount of new material but much of the slightly over-generous two-hour show recycles routines from her previous hits Into the Hoods, Some Like It Hip Hop and Groove on Down the Road. The new show's production values have been kept deliberately low-key with a fairy-lit stage banked with a useful cliff of black crates. This simple structure supplies platforms and seating for 30-odd dancers drawn from the ZooNation family including the Youth Company (which was seven years old last birthday). This un-flashy party vibe is reinforced by the grungy jeans and hoodies worn by the performers although their dog-walker chic is actually rather refreshing in a world where pop singers dress like hookers (a quick 'Hi" from my inner maiden aunt there). This low-tech presentation, coupled with the attractive personalities of the performers, created a very warm, buzzy atmosphere and the appreciative house was packed to capacity thanks to an influx of school parties and a little light discounting. The Wells has got very good at this and rightly so. No theatre has any excuse for empty seats in these days of mass-texting and social media and it's a lesson other venues would do well to learn. The audience enjoyed it all thoroughly, screaming with delight at the merest sniff of a headspin. Prince has a real flair for marshalling a very diverse band of dancers into a tidy yet idiosyncratic ensemble, which is just as well given the uneven range of talent at her disposal. Guest spots were dotted throughout the evening but the flashes of virtuosity displayed by Tommy Franzen and Turbo were few and far between. Too many of the solo spots were over-reliant on some very samey tumbling and the underwritten 'side-together" freestyle dancing on the fringes of the action recalled the bad old days of the audience on Top of the Pops and could be bettered in any dance hall. The musical direction had a similarly retro feel. Like the TV music series of the same name, Unplugged is danced to acoustic cover versions of soul standards but despite some first-rate playing and singing - notably from the scene-stealing soul sister Eliotte Williams N'Dure - there was a strange want of energy and edge. Kate Prince has long been on a mission to strip the violence and misogyny from hip-hop culture but while this makes for a cheery, family-friendly mood it can be a little bland and soft-centred in places and the easy-listening 'unplugged" concept tends to exacerbate this. The anodyne original compositions by Tom Baxter and DJ Walde (whose drippy earworm 'Invisible Me" from Some Like It Hip Hop is reprised here) were little more than a click-track, supplying a beat but not a rhythm. This singer-songwriter mush was supplemented by some fine soul songs but most of the playlist was 30, even 50 years old (The Police, Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke) and my inner maiden aunt could have hummed along to most of it. You'd never have caught a Sixties raver dancing to I Wish That I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate. Why doesn't music just go out of style any more?