Contact
Queens Theatre Spring 2003

Once there was a George Balanchine. Once there was Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins. Once there was Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett. In short, once Broadway audiences could go to a musical with the absolute assurance that they would see brilliant choreography and exciting dancing.

But all those people are dead now, and until Twyla Tharp completes her Billy Joel musical, Susan Stroman is about the best we've got. And so this almost-all-dance show comes from New York bearing critical praise it won more-or-less by default and really doesn't deserve.

There's little that's actually wrong with this show, but it's just all B-grade material, mutton dressed as lamb. The show, conceived and choreographed by Stroman and written by John Weidman, is made up of three independent dance stories. The first, inspired by the Fragonard painting The Swing, is a brief joke - an 18th-century girl flirts with her aristocratic beau but really gets it on with the servant. There's no real dance, just some dreadfully-acted mime and minor acrobatics, but the piece is mercifully short.

The second piece, while also just an extended joke, turns out to be the most successful of the evening. A mousy housewife taken to an Italian restaurant by her boorish husband has a string of romantic fantasies to appropriately lush music by Greig and Tchaikovsky. The gimmick is that the dance vocabulary is entirely drawn from classical ballet, but inventively tweaked to make it look fresh and comic, and Sarah Wildor has an endearingly gamine quality.

The evening's main dance is a case of opportunities missed more than seized. An overly complex and melodramatic plot has a suicidal advertising executive (Is there any other kind?) encountering a mysterious and seductive woman at a retro-dance club. The story set-up takes up nearly half the hour, leaving far too little time for dance, and while the sight of a stage full of people doing variants on the Lindy, to recorded pop music ranging from Benny Goodman's Sing Sing Sing to Robert Palmer's Simply Irresistible, is inherently delightful, the choreography far too infrequently rises above this automatic level of excitement.

Of course Tharp was setting dance based on ballroom forms to pop music twenty years ago, and Robbins forty years ago, and Balanchine sixty years ago. But if Stroman actually made it work, we'd be happy to see it done again. But only very briefly, as in the Beyond the Sea sequence, does the choreography really come alive, while the climactic duet is almost assertively unromantic, unoriginal and dreary. Leigh Zimmerman is appropriately long-limbed and sexy in a Fosse-dancer way, but Michael Praed, playing a man who can't dance, gives the impression of an actor who can't dance.

A British friend said afterwards that New Yorkers might well have been raised on a diet of far better choreography, but Londoners are starved for exciting theatre dancing, and would find this show satisfying. I told him to go see Chicago again - even imitation Fosse has more to offer than this second-rate material.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Contact - Queens 2003