Broadway
finds new partner -
dance / Choreography helps advance
shows' themes
By Mindy Aloff
Minneapolis Star Tribune
10-24-1999
In the past couple of
seasons, the musical theater, both in New York ("Fosse,'' "Footloose'') and in
London ("Oklahoma!,'' "Swan Lake") seems to have rediscovered dancing - not
as an ornament or a practical interlude to entertain the audience while the actors or
singers change costume, but as a resource in itself that can help advance the themes or
story of a show, or, in the cases of "Fosse'' and "Swan Lake, '' embody them
fully.
How long this interest will
last is anyone's guess. Still, for Broadway habitues who remember the heydays of Jerome
Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune, or even of George Balanchine and Agnes
de Mille, the current generation's attempt to reignite choreography on Broadway is a
touching effort.
A fascination with dance
history and its attendant elements of retrospection and perfectionism is of some critical
importance to at least three Broadway shows that feature dance.
The shows are
"Contact'' (which opened last month at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater), "Saturday
Night Fever'' (opened this past week at the Minskoff Theater) and "Swing'' (opening
Dec. 9 at the St. James Theater).
In its origins and working
process, "Contact'' - essentially a theater ballet in three parts, with direction and
choreography by Susan Stroman and a (largely tacit) book by John Weidman - may be the
least dependent on historical particulars. In fact, its underlying mechanism is not dance
but rather a wordplay on the term "swing'': swing dance and music, swingers in a
sexual sense, the act of swinging (as in the painting "The Swing,'' by Jean-Honore
Fragonard, which provides the point of departure for the setting and the choreography of
the first section). Still, dancing is the central language.
Stroman's rèsumè includes
premieres for the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company, as well as
choreography for the lamentably short-lived Kander and Ebb musical "Steel Pier,'' for
the recent London revival of "Oklahoma!'' (which she reconceived with Trevor Nunn)
and for the Tony Award-winning "Crazy for You'' and "Show Boat.'' So she
appreciates both the niceties of the concert stage and the theatrical necessities of
commercial enterprises.
"Because I come from
the theater, all of my choreography comes from plot and characters,'' Stroman said in a
recent interview. "We now refer to 'Contact' " - the title of both the show as a
whole and of the third part on its own - "as a dance play. That is, we took a company
of dancers who act and actors who dance and created a piece for them that has dance all
the way through.''
The story of a
disillusioned man who saves his own life through the discovery of the joys of dancing - in
his case, of contemporary swing dancing - "Contact'' incorporates Stroman's memory of
having visited a late-night dance club in New York's meat-market district and observing
there "a girl alone in a yellow dress.''
"I knew somebody was
going to dance with this girl,'' Stroman said, "and that she was going to change
someone's life.'' The Girl in a Yellow Dress (Deborah Yates) and the guy whose life gets
changed (Boyd Gaines) are fantasized into nightly reality. The swing dancing they learn to
do together is also the product of an idea, in Stroman' s words, "of people
connecting and touching.''
Heightened `Fever'
At the opposite end of the
spectrum - in terms of its mission, the length of its development (eight years), and its
challenge to overcome an "original version'' - is "Saturday Night Fever,'' which
has sought to translate to the stage the dramatic events, characters, music and dance
imagery of the 1977 film that catapulted its composers (Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, a k
a the Bee Gees), its star (John Travolta) and its dance focus (the hustle, a complicated
relative of the mambo) into the Valhalla of collective popular memory.
The show, a project dear to
its conceiving producer, Robert Stigwood, who also produced the film, has been playing in
London for more than a year to capacity audiences, said director/choreographer Arlene
Phillips, whose work is familiar to New Yorkers from "Starlight Express'' and
"Lord of the Dance.''
"The dancing in this
show goes much further than it does in the film,'' Phillips said. "In the film, they
do more line dances than actual Hustles. Also, in the film, the competition dancers who
surround the main character, Tony Manero, aren't trained dancers; they're club dancers. In
the 1990s, people know a lot more about dance: their experiences of doing it and seeing it
are much broader than they were 20 years ago. We've taken what, in the film, was the most
important thread - the dancing - and have made big dance numbers that reach a peak. In the
show, we use the dance to celebrate what dancing did for people of that time. It made
every person in the world feel that if he could walk or move, he could dance.''
Phillips says her
responsibilities as a director and as a choreographer "fight all the time.''
"As a director,'' she said, "you want to bring out the dark side of the story,
the depth, the harsh truth. As a choreographer, you're celebrating the magic and the
dance. Sometimes, I've got to pull down the dance, even though the dancers are doing a
very exciting move in a particular number, because the actor who plays Tony has a dance
background but not a life in dance, and, as he's on stage so much of the time, he
physically couldn't go that far in an evening."
Dance is everything
With "Swing," on
the other hand, it seems as if nothing is being spared to showcase bravura dancing - which
will be crucial to that show, as it doesn't have a proper book. Performing in it will be
some of the most heralded contemporary exponents of various facets of swing dancing, from
the Lindy Hop to hip-hop.
"But it's more than a
revue,'' said Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the director and overall choreographer.
"There's no Talmudic
dissertation or sociological material, but there is a message about swing dancing, which
is that you can't do it alone. What we know about swing dance, which was especially
popular between the 1920s and the 1940s and is enjoying a comeback now, is that it never
went away. It underlies rock 'n' roll, and it keeps morphing.
"No one wrote
something out and said, 'Let's put this up,' but in the course of developing the show, we
began to group the dances and musical numbers. Some of the groupings are shorter
anecdotes, and some are in a longer form.
"I also knew that what
would make the show really exciting was to be as inclusive of as many styles of swing as I
could find, and to find as many championship couples to do it as I could. We have Lindy
hopping, jive, western, hip-hop. I'm putting them together as a kind of privileged curator
and theatricalizing the arcs of these different dances.''
