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WHERE & WHEN
"Swing!," now in previews, opens Thursday at the St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th
St., Manhattan. For tickets, call 212-239-6200. Limited $20 tickets at box office for day
of performance.
SOARING INTO the air at the beginning of the Roaring '20s, and with a legacy encompassing
some of the great names of American music, swing has had its ups and
downs. At the moment the graph line is jutting skyward-and climbing, with the word
"craze" often attached. Far fuzzier logic has inspired Broadway productions,
so who's to dispute that the timing is right for a fast-paced musical with a title that
says it all: "Swing!" Certainly not Ann Hampton Callaway, the respected singer
and songwriter making her Broadway debut in the show that is in previews
at the St. James Theatre.
The show opens Thursday.
Callaway is a willowy brunette with songwriting credits that include the theme song and
lyrics for CBS' "The Nanny" and the words Barbra Streisand warbled to James
Brolin at their wedding. The multitalented, dusky-voiced Callaway is singing and playing
the piano in "Swing!" Modestly eschewing "dancing" as part of her
role, she adds, "I also move. I took dance classes and moved with great feeling but
not great aplomb," says Callaway, a Chicago native and one of two musically talented
daughters of musically talented parents.
"I was taller than the boys. It was hard for me to get into the swing of
really dancing. But this show inspires me. I've enjoyed freeing up my body.
"I've taken lessons"-from Maria Torres, a dancer and choreographer who's in the
cast. Director-choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett "hasn't asked me to do anything
very difficult," Callaway insists. "But you don't have to be a great dancer to
be a swing dancer." A thin story line loosely weaves the show's
three dozen or so songs-classics such as Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a
Thing" and new swing tunes such as Callaway's "Two and
Four," one of several she's written since joining the project. She sees additional
lyrics written for Benny Goodman's "Stompin' at the Savoy" as "a wonderful
opportunity to paint a picture and transport people to that place. Just imagine 4,000
people on the dance floor-the sound, the buzz, the excitement, the extraordinary
musicians!" Ellington's song, subtitled "If It Ain't Got That Swing," sets
the tone at the opening of the show. Callaway wrote "Two and Four," she says,
"as material to set up Laura Benanti [her younger co-star] as the person who's
learning about swing-as some of the people in the audience are, too." (They, however,
have to limit their movements to toe-tapping; this is not a show that encourages audience
participation, regardless of how infectious the music is.) A little later in the first
act, Hampton and Everett Bradley, a co-star and co-creator, are supposedly meeting on a
blind date when they do "Bli-Blip," also by Ellington. "This establishes
that I'm shy and don't know how to dance," she says. Another of their numbers is,
appropriately for her, "I Won't Dance" (Jerome Kerns-Oscar Hammerstein II), to
which she's also contributed additional lyrics.
There are plenty of others who do dance, including Bradley, a former "Stomp"
cast member. One of the goals of "Swing!" is to show the many types of swing
dancing-East Coast, West Coast, Western, Latin (where Torres shines)-as well as
celebrate what Callaway calls "feel-good" music.
"When you hear swing music, there's an immediate sense of freedom
and joy," she says. "It's sexy, adult; it invites people to be together, to
touch each other, to express themselves in a way that's delightful, not depressing."
Sitting in her dressing room recently, Callaway, deliberately thinner since "I gave
up meat, caffeine and alcohol and joined a gym to get in shape for this show," says
she believes her next-to-last CD, "To Ella With Love," may have been a factor
behind the invitation to star in "Swing!" Callaway was offered a job singing in
a club three days after she arrived in New York at the end of the '70s. It launched her
career. But the singer had never been in a musical-in contrast to the other singing
Callaway, her younger sister, Liz, who's been in several, including a long stint in
"Cats." "Over the years I'd auditioned for shows, and at first the response
I got was that I seemed older than I was, so come back in 10 years. But when I became as
old as my persona," the 40-year-old says with a laugh, she found herself "in
competition with all these people who'd been climbing up on the Broadway ladder and had
lots of credits." Her own credits are hardly piddling-but along the lines of cabaret
and concert performances, songwriting (more than 200 songs) and recording ("Easy
Living," her new CD from Sin-Drome Records, is her seventh). When unknown lyrics by
the late songwriter Cole Porter were discovered, she wrote some music that has been given
the stamp of approval by his estate. She became associated with Streisand when the latter
selected her song "At the Same Time" to sing to President Bill Clinton at a
fund-raising gala. Streisand then asked her to write lyrics to music by Rolf Lovland that
became "I Dreamed of You," which she sang at her wedding.
At the moment-late at night, after she's finished her performance and has gone home to
Croton-on-Hudson-Callaway is working on "patter" for Streisand's New Year's Eve
extravaganza in Las Vegas. (She also does a dead-on imitation of the familiar Brooklyn
accent that's been at the other end of a number of telephone calls from the West Coast.)
Callaway says Streisand has been one of her inspirations, and among the others she
mentions (Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett), she includes her parents.
"They're my soulmates," she says of her mother, Shirley Callaway, a well-known
vocal coach in Manhattan, and her father, John Callaway, a retired journalist who
encouraged her to start keeping a journal at age 10 and taught her to scat sing. "The
Callaways," she says proudly, "are a bunch of singing and dancing fools."
On the shelf above Callaway's dressing room mirror, there's a black and white photograph
of a wistful-looking little girl.
"That's me," she says, poised to make her Broadway debut.
"I wanted to be reminded of where I began."
