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The title refers to the figure-skating legend and Olympian who, in the noughties, captivated the US with her performances on ice, winning a total of five world championships. Here, the four teen skaters trying to make it big worship her, quite literally, invoking her for strength on and off the ice.

It is a great central idea with moments of frozen action as each girl sends a wish, a fear or prayer up to a godlike, absent Kwan in their most anxious or exhilarated moments. Christie Spessard’s play has verve, capturing the extremes of adolescent life and competitive sport. Energetically directed by Ryan Pangracs, it is full of humour with some zingers and movement that contains a true sense of gliding.

There is Dahlia (Isabella Fay), who is desperately trying to please her mother through her skating, and the ambitious Marnina (played by Spessard), whose sister has died, and who is striving to have her own solo moment in the annual show for which they are training. Courtney (Skyler Sajewski) and Iris (Hannah Breshears) make up the group but are a little less coloured in.

There are some echoes of I, Tonya in the feral competition between the girls. Their bullying, emotional manipulative and physically abusive trainer, Eve (Jasmyn Donya Molaei), brings black humour. “You can handle a little pain,” she tells them, and considers them to be her daughters, but this element could benefit from developing spikier and more serious undercurrents.

So could the relationships between the characters; there is a hint of same-sex longing for two of them alongside Marnina’s grief and Dahlia’s family traumas. But you don’t quite get to know them enough, and the interesting issues they raise around teenhood remain buried beneath humour and camaraderie.

The plot is flimsy too. The girls are training for an annual holiday show and get snowed in by a blizzard. This opens up the ground for conflict or bonding between them, and there is some of this, but it feels too slight: not quite emotional or dramatic enough.

Thankfully there is so much energy and charisma in the performances that it becomes sheer good fun to watch. The characters are endearing too: they perform their numbers at the end and you find yourself rooting for each of them. A play brimming with potential brilliance.