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By Martin Denton - December 12, 1999

Just because a show has music in it and plays in a theatre, it is not necessarily musical theatre. Such is the case with Swing!, the latest of New York’s hybrid entertainments to defy easy classification. It consists of nearly two hours of non-stop dancing and singing, all to the smooth and snappy accompaniment of a sleek big band-styled orchestra called The Gotham City Gates. There’s no dialogue, no story, no through-line, no point of view. What there is is swing music, lots of it, from Duke Ellington’s "It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing" to Louis Prima’s "Sing, Sing, Sing," with pretty much everything you’d expect in between (plus the occasional unfamiliar tune offering a contemporary counterpoint).

It’s pleasant and tuneful and entertaining in its way, but it’s hardly the sort of thing that a drama critic can really sink his teeth into: Swing! has more in common with competitive ballroom dancing or Olympic synchronized swimming than it does with the traditions of musical revue. The people on stage are good at what they do—very good, in some cases—but the vehicle in which they are performing has no theatrical purpose that I can make out. We could be watching Swing! on TV or in a nightclub or at Madison Square Garden (with the dancers’ and musicians’ moves magnfied for us on one of those giant video screens): I’m certain the experience would feel more or less the same. The St. James Theatre, the grand old Broadway house where Swing!’s producers have installed this show, was once home to Oklahoma! and The King and I and Hello, Dolly!; that’s the only thing that Swing! has in common with the genre known as musical theatre.

Mind you, this isn’t a bad thing, but it’s tricky: the folks responsible for Swing! are marketing it as a musical of some kind or other. So all of the forgoing is by way of managing your expectations, both for the piece itself and for the perspective that someone like me necessarily brings to an evaluation of it. And now here’s my evaluation: I didn’t like it. Swing! is, simply, not the kind of show I go to the theatre to see. Lots of people in the audience at the performance I attended responded enthusiastically, but the experience for me was repetitive and unengaging. (I should add that while the response was enthusiastic it was not ecstatic; Swing! did not feel like a hit to me.)

That said, there were certainly a few musical numbers that I did enjoy. Foremost among these was "Cry Me a River," amusingly performed here by singer Laura Benanti and trombonist Steve Armour as a facetious bluesy duet, with Ms. Benanti’s crystal-clear voice saucily matched to Mr. Armour’s mellow licks: a sweet idea, in conception and execution. Ms. Benanti (who, by the way, you will not recognize as having played Maria opposite Richard Chamberlain in The Sound of Music last season), is the main reason you will want to see Swing!: she’s in total command of a burgeoning talent, as she demonstrates in her other number, a medley of "Two and Four" and "Hit Me with a High Note and Watch Me Bounce." We don’t get to see nearly enough of her here.

The same is true of the talented dancer Michael Gruber, late of Cats, whose first act solo "Billy-a-Dick" is one of the show’s few choreographic misfires and whose second act number "Boogie Woogie Country" is so brief it’s almost not there. Another veteran of Broadway musicals, Scott Fowler, registers strongly near the end of Act One in a Gene Kelly-ish ballet to "I’ll Be Seeing You" and then we pretty much never see him again either.

Top-billed soloists Ann Hampton Calloway and Everett Bradley get lots more stage time, though they are never particularly impressive. Bandleader/musician Casey MacGill has several numbers, too: he’s skillful but rather unassuming. Blonde, leggy Caitlin Carter, who has some attention-grabbing moments in "Blues in the Night," is the standout among the dance ensemble. Robert Royston and Laureen Baldovi do a showy number of their own devising in the country-western section of the program; Beverly Durand and Carol Bentley do some crowd-pleasing aerial choreography on bungee corded-swings to a song called "Bill’s Bounce."

The choreography is mostly by Lynne Taylor-Corbett: it’s competent but tends to look the same after a while. The eye-catching costumes are by William Ivey Long; serviceable sets and lighting are by Thomas Lynch and Kenneth Posner, respectively. As I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, but to my mind there’s nothing terribly right with it either. When I spend $75 to see a musical, I expect something more substantive (and more substantial) than Swing! But I’m a drama reviewer, remember: what do I know about a show like Swing!?

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