‘Dance’ Music Gives Classic Broadway Choreography a Fresh Twist

“What is drama, after all,” Alfred Hitchcock famously asked, “but life with the dull bits cut out?” Well spoken. But “Gotta Dance!,” the new Off Broadway show produced by Riki Kane Larimer, takes the opposite tack. What if you were to take the most exciting bits of 12 great Broadway shows — and one masterpiece of a movie musical — and combine them into one production?I’m probably not the first to compare “Gotta Dance!” to “That’s Entertainment” in the way it offers one brilliant number after another, with barely any chance to breathe, and it has the added benefit of not bothering with the often awkward narration which is the only dated aspect of that 1974 compilation film.The goal of directors Nikki Feirt Atkins and Randy Skinner is not to reinterpret these numbers and these shows, but to recreate them as closely as possible. This is especially impressive in the numbers from Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s landmark film, “Singin’ in the Rain,” which are enhanced by intimate details that I never thought I’d see properly presented on a stage. “Gotta Dance!” opens with “Broadway Rhythm,” in which RJ Higton and Deanna Doyle fill the formidable dance shoes of Kelly and Cyd Charisse. Here, conductor Eugene Gwozdz inserts a few bars of “American in Paris” into the original Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown song, before they segway into the original orchestration by Lennie Hayton and Skip Martin, and this rah-rah showbiz anthem slows down and becomes transmuted into pure terpischoric eroticism. They don’t miss a thing, as when Mr. Higton puts on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, giving him an innocent, nerdy look inspired by jazz age comedy icon Harold Lloyd, and Ms. Doyle teasingly removes said spectacles from his face, rubbing them on her inner thigh while he (and all the men in the house) collectively sigh with sexual tension, finally kicking them into the wings. We even get the scarfaced mob boss flipping a coin, a move echoed in perfect unison by his two henchmen.Among the legendary choreographers honored here are Jerome Robbins, with “Gypsy,” “West Side Story,” and “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” Bob Fosse, with “Pippin,” and Michael Bennett with “A Chorus Line.” The Robbins numbers are especially satisfying: “All I Need is the Girl” finds Mr. Higton as Tulsa, first demonstrating a dance routine to Ms. Doyle as Rose, who gradually joins in; the final part, when they’re finally dancing together, is almost better than sex — at least in terms of what can be presented in a theater. This project also underscores the potency of the original production of “West Side Story.” Despite innumerable revivals and reinterpretations and two mostly-fine film adaptations, there’s nothing as powerful as Robbins’s original staging of “Cool.” Thankfully, a video exists from “The Ed Sullivan Show” of Hank Brunjes as Riff and the original Jets, which must have been a useful resource. There’s a magic moment, captured photographically, in which the Jets, like their namesakes, leap into the air and crouch simultaneously, thus somehow both expanding and contracting at the same time.The program tends to lean heavily into more contemporary repackagings of vintage songs, like “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” “Swing,” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” the latter giving us Jessica Lee Goldwyn teaching us how to shimmy, Ann-Margret style, in a white fringe dress; it’s an electrifying lesson that I’ll not soon forget, as well as the Broadway incarnations of “An American in Paris” and “Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn.” There’s more than dancing on display; the singing is secondary but it’s excellent, like Kate Louissaint doing “Sweet Georgia Brown” with Brandon Burks and Ahmad Simmons, a trio revisiting the dynamics of Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers introducing “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Libby Doyle delivers “Mr. Monotony,” literally a throw-away song by Irving Berlin, deleted from at least three productions before finally being rescued for “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” prior to Sara Esty, Brandon Cowperthwaite, and Blake Zelesnikar enacting it as a pas de deux that becomes a pas de trois. The key strength of “Gotta Dance!” is both the concept itself and the means by which it perfectly executes upon that concept. Here’s hoping that it leads to a string of sequels and follow-ups, much as “That’s Entertainment” did 50 years ago, that would explore the works of such worthy choreographers as George Balanchine, Michael Kidd, Agnes DeMille, Twyla Tharp, and even the abstract geometric constructs of Busby Berkeley. Further, the two numbers from “Singin’ in the Rain” make the point that this would be the perfect team to give us the first fully successful Broadway adaptation of that cinematic classic. Which reminds me, the second of those two numbers is called “Tongue Twisters,” better known as “Moses Supposes,” the only song in the “Rain” score by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green. How appropriate for a show that opened this past Tuesday, on the day before Paisach.

‘Dance’ Music Gives Classic Broadway Choreography a Fresh Twist

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