‘The Symphony of Dance’ Review: Slick Doc About Derek Hough and Wife

If you come into Jason Bergh’s The Symphony of Dance with a pre-existing investment in Derek Hough and Hayley Erbert’s love story, the health-related derailment of their 2023 touring show and her subsequent recovery and return, it’s likely that the documentary will reduce you to a blubbering puddle.

It’s more than likely that even if you’ve never watched Hough’s competitive dancing, his Emmy-winning Dancing With the Stars contributions or Erbert’s So You Think You Can Dance run, The Symphony of Dance will generate at least some tears. It’s undeniably emotional stuff. But it’s less a love story than a commercial for a love story, with a running time — 110 minutes — that’s a minimum of 20 minutes too long and one self-indulgent triumphant sentimental climax after another. The film evades addressing so many physical and psychological complications that it makes something that was obviously incredibly difficult come across as unsatisfyingly easy in places.

The documentary’s title is taken from the 2023 show that Hough and Erbert, his new wife, conceived together in some way that the movie doesn’t want to explain beyond giving her lots of credit. The show hit the road just months after their wedding, with all involved viewing it as a triumph that Hough was deeply invested in both creatively and financially.

Then, at a December 2023 performance, Hough and Erbert bumped heads during the show. Nobody thought anything of it immediately, but Erbert progressed from a severe headache to collapsing backstage. She was rushed to a hospital, diagnosed with a subdural hematoma and a craniotomy was immediately performed, saving her life.

Four months later, Hayley was ready to dance again and Derek was ready to have his show resume again, but nobody was quite sure if she really should be returning to perform so soon after brain surgery.

If you’re thinking The Symphony of Dance is some complex and gritty exploration of rehabilitation, trauma and uncertainty, it most surely is not. It’s all about the power of love and the power of dance. That means that even though Hayley’s surgeon shows up to explain “subdural hematoma” to any viewer who has never watched a single episode of The Pitt, House, ER, St. Elsewhere, Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy or any other medical drama, nobody stops to put a doctor on-camera to address whether or not Hayley actually should be resuming dance four months after a near-death experience, as if “We’ll have EMTs backstage” answers any and all concerns.

This is not a documentary that wants you to have follow-up questions. Actually, it isn’t a documentary that wants you to have initial questions. It’s about faith and feelings, and if you’re thinking, “What about the healing power of actual medical treatment and recovery?” those are tertiary and quaternary parts of the process.

There is a great documentary about an artistic genius whose life is turned upside down by his wife’s medical catastrophe, building to a magnum opus with the word “Symphony” in its title — but that documentary is American Symphony, Matthew Heineman’s film about Jon Batiste, set against the dual backdrops of wife Suleika Jaouad’s leukemia treatments and Batiste’s preparations for a one-night-only performance called “American Symphony” at Carnegie Hall.

Whereas Heineman’s film used its incredible access to the central couple to capture moments that come across as beautifully and uncomfortably intimate and unstaged, Bergh (The Greatest Love Story Never Told) uses his access to make everything pretty and entirely too contrived.

It’s a choice to concentrate on how lovely and youthful the main couple is, to join the recovery already well in progress, and not dwell in the near-tragedy. Though there are scenes in the hospital that are tough to watch, scenes of disorientation and pain, Bergh wants to get through that as quickly as possible, to get to the point where Hayley’s hair has grown back into an endearing pixie cut and he can shoot her exclusively from the side on which you’d never know what she’d gone through. Were there points in her recovery when she was slow or clumsy or her dancing lacked grace? That’s not what Bergh wants to show.

Some viewers will be more than a little appreciative at how quickly Symphony leaps from “scary” to “basically fine,” even if it felt weird and disingenuous to me. Yes, Derek experiences guilt at failing his partner, who was injured under his wing. She keeps reassuring him. Anything imperfect (including whether their relationship, which started as one of employer/employee, is problematic in any way) is rushed through and made to look commercial-glossy and magazine-ready. A lot of reality is lost in the up-close-and-personal scenes in which Hayley and Derek expound on the documentary’s themes so thoroughly it feels basically scripted, or in multiple scenes of Hayley taking sentimental baths or showers in a way so artificial that the purpose must have been a cleansing of her soul rather than her body.

Would that quite as much care were taken in filming the actual dance. If the last 30 minutes of The Symphony of Dance had been gorgeously photographed and edited footage of the show itself, with Derek and Hayley front and center, I would have forgiven the bland biographical sketches of each dancer, the number of times Derek says that the theme of the show — and, unspoken but painfully obvious, the documentary — is “love,” and the schmaltzy climactic beats in which platitudes and the sentiment of Ali Helnwein’s score made me think, “Well, at least we reached the happy ending.” Instead, there’s more talk about the healing power of dance than footage of these healed and healing people dancing.

It’s a complementary and complimentary documentary, capable of making even cynics teary but ultimately best suited for viewers who have already seen the show and already know these people, their story and its happy ending.