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It Don't
Mean A Thing If Broadway
Ain't Got That Swing!
October 14, 1999
By Randy Gener, Broadway Now
NEW YORK — Time to dig out those zoot suits, skirts and saddle shoes, cats and kittens. That's 'cuz Broadway's ready to hit a hot note and take a full Swing!.
This new Broadway dance musical, directed and choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett (Titanic and Chess), promises to be the real deal.
Yes, it's true, after a fifty-year absence, swing is back, and this 1940s dance craze is once again cooking in movies, nightclubs and Gap ads. But the creators of Swing! have worked long and hard to make sure that Broadway music-theater spectacular is no mere giddy whirl into Lindy Hop nostalgia -- no kitschy memory-walk into the big-band halls of Louis Primo, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie.
This is no Great White Way fad. No way, daddy-o!
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT ME? Swing!, which begins previews Nov. 2, is a brand-new musical theater party with a different vibe. No bandwagon jumper, it promises to be the true swinger. It's a toast to boogie-woogie pleasures—and a new creation that exhibits its own fancy footwork.
Featuring world-class swing dancers and starry jazz/pop singers like Ann Hampton Callaway, Laura Benanti and Casey MacGill, Swing! jitterbugs to the rhythms of traditional swing songs, while throwing into the dance mix several all-new tunes and original compositions. Accompanying these hepcat singers and dancers is a live swing band made up of members of The Blues Jumpers, the Count Basie Band and the Lionel Hampton Band. This Broadway musical is an honest-to-goodness dance bash that effortlessly steps back just enough to move forward into the future.
"Paul Kelly. He brought the idea for Swing! to [producer] Richard Frankel, then I kind of picked it up from there and worked on it for a long time," director/choreographer Taylor-Corbett told BroadwayNow during a recent rehearsal for the show. "Since then, many people have contributed and made suggestions to it, and now Jerry Zaks as production supervisor is helping take a load off my shoulders by stepping back and helping see things from afar. I've been lucky because I've got a lot of very knowledgeable people helping me. But even from the start there was a definite decision that we wanted to represent swing with great accuracy and authenticity."
As a result, Taylor-Corbett—who also choreographed such films as Footloose and My Blue Heaven and is the prime creative force behind The Dancing Muppets on Sesame Street -— search all over the country for expert dancers and competitive swing champions. Ryan Francois and Jenny Thomas, for instance, are regarded as one of the world's foremost Lindy couples—in fact, the first couple ever to win Lindy titles in both the American Swing Dance Championships and the U.S. Open Championships. Laureen Baldovi and her partner Robert Royston are also world-class swing dancers, but whose specialty is Country Western Swing dancing. Not only have Baldovi and Royston won more country western swing championships than any other couple in the history of country dance, they've been recently inducted into the California Dance Hall of Fame.
"The major forces behind Swing! are guys like these," said Taylor-Corbett, referring to swing royalty as Royston and Baldovi, and Francois and Thomas. "But then I also knew I didn’t want to have a variety show of swing dances. So we tried to create arcs and interesting stories for these dancers to arrive in so that they had a context. We tried to make it a diverse experience in terms of a human experience not just a dance experience. I collaborated with these dancers closely because it's their language that I am trying to help speak."
Swing! spotlights 30 dance numbers that trace the evolution of the dance form itself from the 1930s to the present-day. Did you know that there are as many as nine different types of swing styles embraced by many thousands of people across the country? In addition to traditional swing dancing, there are "The Balboa," "West Coast Swing," "Houston Whip," "St. Louis Shag," "Florida Beach Bop," "Country Swing," "Latin Swing," and "Lindy Hop."
"When you talk about swing," said Swing! performer Maria Torres, "it encompasses about nine different forms of dances. In this particular show, you're going to see everything from the origins of swing which is the Lindey jitterburg to the West Coast Swing which has the influence of blues. You're going to see the East Coast swing which has the influence of country. You're also going to see different fusions, where we're showing how Latin and swing cuts together because there are a lot of similar steps."
According to Torres, who recently choreographed a Ricky Martin video and was a co-chairperson of Lincoln Center's Midsummer Night Swing series, Broadway audiences will quickly glean the great variety of swing styles. "You'll see it in the differences of swing music we've chosen and the different types of dancing performed. You'll see it in the personality of the characters in the show. We're taking you into a journey of an American folk dance, and how that American folk dance has influenced many different ethnic and class backgrounds of people. We want to inspire you to come out and learn the dance for yourself."
Swing! gives plenty reasons to dress up and smile because it overflows with the swank spirit of renewal, of reinvention. "What intrigued me about doing this particular show," added Torress, "is that for the first time the dancers were going to have to train not only to dance swing but also to do partner dancing. Partner dancing is something we should celebrate and enjoy because it’s the one form of swing that brings all the ethnicities together. It doesn’t matter where you're from. It doesn’t matter what color you are. It doesn’t matter that you're poor. If the music is there, you can dance to it. You can touch-dance together and relate. Swing is very huge right now. Young people are getting involved in it because swing helps make them communicate. Swing can put the community back together again, so I think it’s a positive thing. It’s a great thing. For me the good thing when you do touch dancing, whether its swing or Latin dancing, has to do with partner dancing it promotes contact between people.
While the hype about the current swing scene revival all around the country that that people are rediscovering what it means to jump, jive and wail, the creators and dancers of Swing! wear their heart and ambitions on seersucker sleeves. Not only are they interested in making Broadway a fitting place for some retro action, they're also putting on their own new moves on swing music and dance.
In Swing!, for instance, performer Everett Bradley co-wrote several new songs as "Throw That Girl Around" and "Show Me What You Got." Even vocal stylist Ann Hampton Callaway wrote a new song "Two and Four" specially for this musical.
"When I started working on the show, I was not on up on swing dance," Callaway told BroadwayNow. "I had grown up on swing music for years and years. I didn’t know there's so many different forms of swing. I think Latin swing is so sexy, and I hope there's even more in the show. In the 1920s and 1940s swing had a certain style. But when Louis Primo over on the scene, swing suddenly began to have a very different jump beat, so it's been very educational for me. In the beginning, there was no Louis Primo number in the show. So I took Primo's 'All of Me' and said 'Lets put some Primo rhythms in here. It's perfect for the scene between Everett and me as characters. It really gives that color that was missing at first."
And since Swing! is a Broadway show, it's crafted so that the theatrical experience becomes more than a spectacle about seeing people get up and dance. "To really appreciate great dancing on stage, I think the eyes and ears need break from each other," said Callaway. "You need to have a break from dancing so that you can come back to it. It's same as singing. Our director [Taylor-Corbett] has found a beautiful way to make swing music and dance all intertwine. There are times when I get to swing for dancers or with dancers. And there are times when I'm alone on stage. It’s a real mixture of different experiences so that your mind keeps getting surprised."
In the hepcat theater of Swing!, Broadway audiences get to have a great night on the town, without settling for chump-change and monkey bars. The twist is that Swing might just jump into neo-swing territory. "That's what I love about putting a Broadway show together," explained Callaway. "The dancers are allowed to bring their unique colors, and we get to see their imagination come to life. As singers and compoers, we get to create it and write new lyrics and songs. Swing keeps evolving. Twenty years from now swing will evolve again. Some new group of people will creating something new that we can't think of right now because they will have new life experiences. Hopefully we have created from working together in Swing! a new dance sound that hasn’t been heard before, and a new sing dance form that has not been seen or danced before. That's what happens when you put creative people together. Collaboration results in new surprises."
