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Swing! Swing!
Swing!
Swing! jumps, jives and wails at the St. James Theatre
Playbill - December,
1999
By Jerry Tallmer
There was once a boy who was riding in a taxi on a Friday night with two of the girls from his high school class. As the taxi was cutting uptown through Columbus Circle, a strange, wonderful, incredible sound - a syncopated wailing of banshees to the rain-thrill of a drum---burst forth from the cab's tinny little radio. "What is that?" cried the boy, his heart skipping two or three beats. The two girls, the same age as he, 16 or so, which of course made them infinitely superior - glanced briefly at one another before Lucille, or maybe it was Greta, condescendingly let drop two words of enlightenment: "It's swing." For countless Friday nights thereafter, the boy who'd been the object of their scorn made it a point to be by his radio at ten o'clock for the first pulse-racing chords of Benny Goodman and the band swarming into "Don't Be That Way."
"You know," says Lynne Taylor-Corbett, choreographer and director of Swing! the big all-singing, all dancing musical (opening December 9 at the St. James Theatre) that brings back the swing era of the 1930's and 40's back, reborn, to Broadway, "what really interested me was when swing began resurfacing in the 80's as a metaphor for what people-old and young, men and women, parents and children, brothers and sisters, black and white-enjoyed doing. It involved touching. It involved trust. It was not people alone on the floor, isolated, not touching, eyes closed."
Just to hear the song titles at the St. James is, for anyone whose brain and central nervous system haven't dropped out of sight down the memory hole, to get the shivers: "It Don't Mean a Thing," "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," "Sing Sing Sing!" and on and on - some 30 numbers, played by former members of the Blues Jumpers, the Illinois Jaquet, the Lionel Hampton Band, danced by Lindy Hoppers and others, sung by Ann Hampton Callaway and others.
"It's not a history lesson," says Ms. Taylor-Corbett. "We kind of grip you and take you for a ride. Still, Ann Hampton Callaway injects a little history into the middle of her rendition of 'Stompin' at the Savoy' with the great line: 'To think that syncopation outwitted segregation.' "
History is also represented by a 33 year-old Londoner named Ryan Francois-one of Swing!'s associate choreographers-who links back to a famous old-time Lindy Hopper named Frankie Manning, a New York senior citizen who links back to a man named Shorty Snowden. In a marathon dance at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in 1927, the year Charles A. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Snowden was asked what that crazy thing he was doing. "The Lindy Hop," Shorty serenely replied.
The team of Ryan Francois and his wife Jenny Thomas, 1997 Lindy Winners in the American Swing Dance and U.S. Open Championships, put plenty of hop and jump into "Jumpin' at the Woodside" and other famed hits, plus a specialty, "Kitchen Mechanics' Night Out," written by Swing! bandleader Casey MacGill.
The latter-day resurgence of swing began in 1983 and '84 as a sort of spontaneous combustion among some young people in Britain, Sweden and Los Angeles. Francois, for instance, was a schoolkid at St. Paul's Way in London's East End. "We started looking at these videotapes of Frankie Manning and a group called Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, and decided to re-create that stuff," he says. When Francois reached America - after having worked with America's own Harold Nicholas in a show in London - he dug up Frankie Manning, who had just retired from long service with the post office.
Manning has now become an elder statesman and adviser to the Swing! company, talking to Lynne Taylor-Corbett and her dancers about his experiences. "We're very lucky," she says. "He's proud to say he's 85. I went to Roseland for the birthday party they have for him every year."
She herself, born in Denver, Colorado ("I'm a postwar baby, so swing is certainly in my background"), grew up listening and dancing to "American Bandstand"-"which you could speak of as a form of swing." Her research has included "looking at as many old movies as possible," notably A Day at the Races, the 1937 Marx Brothers charivari that contains a terrific Lindy sequence. "We also have an incredible discography."
A dancer since the age of four, daughter of a concert-pianist mother, a musically inclined high-school-principal father, she came to New York in 1964 to enroll at the School of the American Ballet, "and was invited to move on after the first year. I was not," she says with a conspiratorial smile, "a 'bun head.' My only higher education is the street. But I was very lucky: I went to the Harkness Ballet, and then in '67/'68 was taken on as the token white of the Alvin Ailey Company." Swing! she says, is several hundred percent more integrated than that: "All shapes, sizes, and colors."
Among her accomplishments in the years since are the choreographing of, onstage, Titanic, Chess, and Song of Singapore; of Footloose and My Blue Heaven on film-not to mention the birthing and rearing of Shaun Taylor-Corbett, 21, "on his way to becoming a diplomat and my biggest fan."
It was an actor named Paul Kelly (not the Paul Kelly of 1950's stage and screen) who first had the idea for a show about swing. Ms. Taylor-Corbett was brought in as director/choreographer in 1998. "I fell headlong into this passion about 14 months ago." Nearer to the opening date, director Jerry Zaks came on board to "be of help," she says, "with the move [from rehearsals] into the theatre. And to be a second eye. There's some refining going on.
Lynne Taylor-Corbett has done
enough digging to know that back in the 30's and 40's there was an older generation which,
as older generations will, saw this new mad music of the young as "something
decadent, dark, terrible and bad." The show at the St. James, she feels, promotes the
spirit of reconciliation, of inclusiveness. "Swing is not a time," she says.
"It's a state of mind." That boy in the taxi, as soon as he started
listening to Benny Goodman every Friday night at ten, knew it even then.
