Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Fall 2008
When Broadway scavenges itself, theater lovers pounce. More than a new work or its cousin, the Movie-made-into-a-musical-or-play, revivals are as close to a sure thing as one gets. Hardly anyone revives a flop; since returning shows were usually hits the first time out, the producer’s job is an easier road as they set about selling that which is not only known but tried and true. For the audience it’s an opportunity to become an expert (if you’re old enough you’ll be able to compare it to your memories of the original, or the revival that followed) or play catch up with a classic (“Wow, I’ve never seen a production of South Pacific—let’s go!”). Creative teams get a chance to re-interpret quality (Julius Caesar set on Wall Street, anyone?), or second tier material, while stars breathe new life into their careers by assaying legendary roles, making them their own.
Gypsy (St. James Theater) has been revived no less than four times since it premiered back in 1959 with Ethel Merman as its star. The current mounting owes its new life to the powerhouse presence of Patti LuPone, but the show’s guardian angel remains its first director and choreographer, Jerome Robbins. His original dances, recreated for this production by Bonnie Walker, have endured through each Broadway incarnation (and the much lauded television movie starring Bette Midler), and while it may not be his strongest theatrical work it’s hard to imagine Gypsy without the amusing numbers in the show’s first half. Propelling the story of the stage mother who won’t rest until her girls play vaudeville’s Orpheum Circuit, is the “act” designed by Mama Rose that will take them to the top, a mishmash of old school tap and showbiz hooey built to showcase first, her daughter Dainty June, and later, the tomboy Louise who eventually blossoms into the legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Robbins employs every trick for maximum comic effect, from leaping chorus boys and baton twirling to the strategic placement of Dainty June’s splits and fan kicks.
These numbers look not a whit like the work of a world-class dance master, but that of Rose, the delusional, stage struck woman at the musical’s center. Robbins is choreographing story and character, apparent even in the gorgeous (by dance standards) “All I Really Need is the Girl.” With a broom as his partner, Tulsa pours his longing into relevés and spins that float through the air like those stars dotting the scene’s backdrop as Louise, who longs to be Tulsa’s partner in the dance and in real-life, mimics him. This duet for three earns applause for its Gene Kelly moves, but breaks hearts with its lovely depiction of unrequited love.
The revival of 1976’s A Chorus Line (Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, closed August), though less than perfect, still has much to offer. In concept alone, other musicals pale against Michael Bennett’s depiction of the dance audition as psychodrama, a brilliant chiaroscuro that never slacks in its ability to entertain or devastate. And A Chorus Line has some of the most stirring choreography ever seen on any stage: from its opening’s electric depiction of a dancer’s cattle call to the finale, a triumph of precision movement that is “One,” this show is jammed with oft-copied gems that defy any choreographer to match them.
“At the Ballet” remains a moving paean to dance as an escape, and a solace (though one wonders if female dancers are still galvanized by The Red Shoes) with Bennett’s cinematic frame abetted by Tharon Musser’s original lighting design. “The Music and the Mirror,” remains one hell of a death-defying solo dance in the hands, er, legs of Charlotte D’Amboise as Cassie, the star dancer who yearns to return to the chorus. Still, compare it to the grainy film of Donna McKechnie (who won a Tony for the original) on YouTube. Good as D’Amboise is, no one could compete with McKechnie’s pained grace infused with desperation as an artist who’s literally dancing for her life.
What’s missing is the type of artistic risk that might’ve vaulted this piece into the here and now. I get the reluctance to tamper with A Chorus Line’s special qualities, but these producers have done no one—not the talented cast, or its audiences–any favors. By mounting what is essentially a waxworks rendition of the show vs. interpreting the material anew they forced the revived A Chorus Line to compete with memory, a war it loses. Play safe, suffer the shame: this revival’s failure of nerve teaches a cautionary lesson I hope others will heed.
Clearly times have changed. Both Bennett and Robbins parlayed a show dance that used a fairly traditional movement vocabulary culled from ballet, tap and jazz. Their deployment feels as necessary to our expectations of musical theater as a bowler hat is to Bob Fosse. But the musical theater has seen striking evolutions in the past two seasons alone; when the form changes, so too must the pieces that make it spin.
Which means a freshening of the ranks. Broadway has frequently hosted choreographers from other genres: Twyla Tharp’s show-stopping Movin’ Out springs readily to mind, as does the work of Lar Lubovitch (Into the Woods, The Red Shoes), Doug Varone (The Triumph of Love) and Mark Dendy (Off-Broadway’s The Wild Party for Manhattan Theater Club). Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening(Eugene O’Neill Theater) cried out for something different; the synthetic skills of a usual musical theater suspect like Susan Stroman (The Producers, Young Frankenstein) or Casey Nicholaw (Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone) would have been anathema to Wedekind’s shattering exploration of repression, teen sexuality and suicide. With its genuine rock score abutting the stringent 19th century German setting, this work required the imagination of one adept at less literal forms of movement, an artful practitioner of soulful revelation.
In Spring Awakening, Bill T. Jones’ Tony-Award winning choreography finds a corresponding vocabulary for the show’s moody extremes. Jumping angularity follows simmering repose in the evening’s explosive “The Bitch of Living,” as the spirit of Jim Morrison takes possession of teenage boys during a Latin lesson. Jones culls a fearful lament from the female chorus’ pulsing bodies as they decry mothers who’ve ill-prepared them for the physical and psychological changes invading their adolescent bodies, and a leaping frenzy of rebellion in “Totally Fucked”. Disturbingly beautiful is the sequence where each child succumbs, as if possessed, to a wave of self-caresses from head to waist. Passed from youth to youth, these explorations serve up moving abstractions of psychic confusion, sexual discovery and the fearful insularity that rocks the world of every youth.
This season avant-garde darling Karole Armitage created the movement for Passing Strange (Belasco Theater), a show that charts the effects of racial and artistic identity on a young man’s quest to find his own musical voice. Like Jones in Awakening, Armitage is not so much choreographing steps as she is a mood. The musician Stew’s story roams from an urban Los Angeles Baptist church to a hedonistic drug-and-sex drenched Amsterdam, and a punk Weimar-centric Berlin whose underground grottos spawn political incendiaries. Armitage gives Passing Strange a rock concert’s verve without neglecting he work’s sharp satire, aided by a cast adept at lightning shifts of physicality. Alas, it closed this summer, but not before film director Spike Lee committed this exceptional work to film. It’s not the last of Armitage uptown either: this winter, the Public Theater’s production of Hair (seen this summer at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park) will be revived on Broadway, so stayed tuned for Armitage’s take on the be-in Sixties.
New ways to dream: never mind Broadway’s current tendency towards low-denominator creativity, with shows more suited to theme parks than New York’s great stages. Ever so often a combination of outside-the box thinking and talent coalesce; shows like the ones described above, or the current [title of show](Lyceum Theater) come along to sweep away the malaise and invigorate the form anew. The work continues, and it’s a hard road: after surviving television’s golden age and the rocked-out 1960s, Broadway must now compete with shortened attention spans wrought by high-tech gadgetry epitomized by IPODS and Gameboys. I believe the theater will win—they don’t call it the Fabulous Invalid for nothing.