Laura Belle Bundy (in pink) and the company of Legally Blonde: The Musical

Published in Attitude: The Dancers Magazine, Summer 2008

“Come and meet those dancing feet.” So beckoned the great Harry Warren’s lyrics to 42nd Street, the title song of a 1932 movie musical that gave a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a Broadway musical.  Warren’s siren call remains potent: from early am until show time, people from around the world sojourn to that 12-block stretch of Manhattan real estate for their fix of a quintessential art form.  As tourists and natives crowd ticket windows or weather the serpentine TKTS line, their collective desire reverberates as they huddle and confer.  The subtext is clear—No Pinter, please. Only a musical will do.

As it happened, 42nd Street’s adaptation into an actual Broadway show (one that garnered Tony nominations for its original 1980 incarnation, and a subsequent 2001 revival) flamed what is now a firmly entrenched trend in modern musicals. The movie-to-musical adaptation has become a genre onto itself.

What this means for the very specific medium of dance called show says loads about Broadway, weekly grosses, and the legacy wrought by such titans as Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille and Bob Fosse to name but a few.  There’s still room for the kind of imagination that brought us A Chorus Line (being revived at the Schoenfeld Theatre) but there’s no denying those producers with an eye on the box office who choose the safe route—“Let’s put their favorite movies on stage and add songs”—are clearly pandering to New York’s booming tourist trade. They may lack imagination, but at least they have the good sense to hire those that do, for these derivations have brought out the best in some of our theater artists (The Lion King, On the Twentieth Century).

Choreographers especially, have managed to transcend the weary déjà vu to give us, in the words of Sondheim, more to see.  Jerry Mitchell assisted Robbins on Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, and is as close to a master of this adapt-a-genre as Broadway’s got.  Since 2000’s The Full Monty, Mitchell’s parlayed his special gift for amplifying pop dance forms into show-stopping numbers.  Hairspray (Neil Simon Theater) is a masterwork, a luscious valentine to the twist, the frug, Dick Clark’s Bandstand and the Motown-fueled ecstasies that made dancing in the streets an imperative for those who came of age in the 60’s.  Fast on its popular heels cameLegally Blonde (Palace Theater), and as its choreographer and director, Mitchell’s clearly learned from the late Michael Bennett, an artist who exploited the stage equivalents of cinematic dissolve and crosscut.  An example is the first act’s “What You Want,” a musical scene whose momentum climaxes with a high-stepping march that summons memories of Fosse’s “I’m a Brass Band,” from Sweet Charity without sacrificing the story’s hipness.

Here, Mitchell’s huge range (he also choreographs the annual Broadway Bares AIDS fundraiser, and the revival of LaCage Aux Folles) encompasses hip-hop, aerobics (dig that second act number where the jump ropes go flying), and step-dancing ala Michael Flately.   But Blonde’s ruling dance is the shimmy, a move that lives on the hips of teenage girls in malls and on street corners across America.  Mitchell adds “dissing” head and neck isolations, pulsing shifts of weight, and conspiratorial finger pops that ornament practically every number.  And sex: in the second act’s “Bend and Snap,” Mitchell exalts female body language’s ability to both beguile straight men, and in a major plot point, to reveal those guys who are into each other: gaydar gets referenced with wit, and without insult.

A new musical set in the 1950s might not sound like the most promising idea–what to do with all that post-war/red-baiting/nuclear-family ennui?  But there was also Elvis and the advent of the television variety show;Curtains (Al Hirschfeld Theater) and Cry-Baby, The Musical (Marquis Theater) are dichotic emblems of that decade, and both are blessed with dances by Rob Ashford.  The last collaboration between John Kander and Fred Ebb, Curtains is a backstage musical comedy murder mystery that fulfills most conventions of its genre (dead bodies, romance, turning a flop into a hit) peopled with the sort of characters who attend rehearsals wearing cocktail dresses.

At first Ashford’s dances feel a touch generic, probably because the musical-within-the-musical (a western called “Robbin’ Hood”) isn’t meant to be very good.  But then comes the chorus dance break for “Show People,” an exuberant melding of rumba moves and show-off turns that give the evening its first jolt of excitement.  It’s fun to chart the making of the backstage musical (a novelty number called “Kansasland” is wonderfully satirical of the times, with its nods to both Agnes DeMille and splashy TV variety shows) alongside the real-time plot (the Fred-and-Ginger fantasy “A Tough Act to Follow”) through its dance.  Though it’s an original musical, Curtains’associations will likely remind you of 50s-era films—a dollop of Funny Face, a touch of The Bandwagon, with a little Les Girls thrown in for good measure.

Ashford’s work in Cry-Baby, the Musical is something else entirely.  An adaptation of another John Water’s film (call it Hairspray-lite) Cry-Baby strives to create a Douglas Sirk universe whose lurid convolutions should have us pitched on the edge of our seats, but the only time that happens is when Ashford’s swivel-hipped dances highjack the stage with verve, energy and a genuine sexual danger the rest of the show sorely lacks.  Again one thinks of Fosse as the male dancers scissor and slink, their pursed lips and lacquered pompadours ripe with sex and mayhem.  The triumph of the evening is a jailbreak sequence called “A Little Upset,” and in it, Ashford goes for broke: inmates tap-dance with license plates affixed to their shoes before leaping, flipping, rolling toward the audience in such aggressive patterns of athletic prowess that suddenly it becomes clear what the show’s been missing.  Too bad Ashford didn’t direct.

Time traveling back to the 1970s, you could certainly do worse than Xanadu (Helen Hayes Theater) a send-up of mirror-balled disco days, and the universally derided 1978 film that starred John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly.  Those who came of age then will recognize Dan Knechtges’ Tony Award-nominated odes to free-style, the bump, line dancing and lively variations on kick-step-ball-change.  There’s even roller-skating: the heroine, gracefully embodied by Kerry Butler, spends the evening gliding from one plot point to the next, accessorized by her blonde, blow-dried flip.  Only one aspect disappoints—the night I saw it, the mid-evening tap solo (during a 1940s flashback sequence) sounded a tad muddy—but it’s a minor blip in a 90 minute entertainment that rarely flags in humor or ingenuity.

For thunderous hoofing, head to Mary Poppins (New Amsterdam Theater, or The House of Disney) where late in the second act, Gavin Lee (whose flying solo on the proscenium’s ceiling is a triumph) and the company roll out a brand of tap that, thanks to choreographer Matthew Bourne, combines percussive pounding with diagonal patterns of movement that made it feel, and sound, like something newly invented.  But it’s a long time to wait—until then, this theme-park-as-Broadway-show, conceived perhaps for the hyperactive minds of children, felt at war with itself as sets and costumes unfurled relentlessly (the act-break’s aggressive product hawking in the aisles, and the absence of a traditional Playbill magazine kinda kills the mood, but maybe you won’t care). The stage becomes a giant maw of color and activity, a situation that so cluttered Act I’s  “Jolly Holiday,” that the dance got a little lost.  What should have left us exhilarated felt ultimately wearing, like a day spent eating too much caramel corn.

Disney could take a tip from The 39 Steps (Cort Theater).  This Roundabout Theater production exploits our ability to imagine by subtraction, not overload, and though it’s not a musical, its marvelous specificity of place and character owe as much to choreography (the original movement was created by Toby Sedgwick, who trained at the Jaques Lecoq School in Paris, and is the director of the Moving Picture Mime Show) as to John Buchan’s source novel, or even Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic film.  I was hard pressed to observe even a moment of stillness—rigor-mortised bodies suspend across laps, feet constantly tap or slide, hands mince or clutch, bodies lurch and bob.  Scenery becomes superfluous when an actor can convey the especial physicality of being tossed about inside a roadster, running through a stream or climbing a mountain’s crag pursued by the police—not to mention escapes through windows that yield comic dividends throughout.  The phrase tour de force feels inadequate for a chase scene on top of a moving train in which speed and wind velocity are conveyed by flailing arms and coattails so accurately that the moment feels positively filmicThe 39 Steps must be seen to be believed.  It’s a stunning evocation of chaos—and a benchmark for the next guy who wants to borrow from the movies.