What’s the origin of the phrase ‘All singing, all dancing’?
From the advertising posters used to promote the 1929 film Broadway Melody - the first musical film - which proclaimed it to be ‘All talking All singing All dancing’.
That was a literal description of the film, but was also intended to suggest a sense of vitality and excitement that the phrase is now used to convey.
In more recent years the term has been applied to high-tech equipment, computers, cars etc. in order to draw attention to their abundant features; for example, this from The Daily Telegraph, November 1995:
“Satellites as small as a box of cornflakes can be launched at little cost by riding piggyback with larger satellites. A handful of these ‘microsatellites’ would be used instead of a single all-singing all-dancing ‘platform’ bristling with instruments.”