Two thousand, the year contact won the Tony for Best Musical, must have been a slow season on Broadway. Or maybe we really have changed in the last few months — maybe stereotyped sexual fantasizing was a brilliant theatrical subject then. Last Thursday’s opening-night audience in Boston wasn’t stirred by contact’s first two pieces, and it mustered a only relieved little ovation for the third. The slow pace of the evening might have been partly due to the company’s adjusting to the stage, always an issue for dancers on tour. But the show seems to come from some older world of crass simulations.
There’s a curious mystique about Broadway. Retread dance material looks new to the regular theatergoer, and even dance watchers get a kick out of seeing familiar stuff in glamorous surroundings. The stories told by choreographer/director Susan Stroman and writer John Weidman rely heavily on earlier, stronger images from movies and ballets.
Whether we realize it or not, we’ve learned to " read " physical action without much help from words. In the first sketch, even if we didn’t have Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting of the girl on the swing and several Liaisons dangereuses movies to guide us, we’d recognize the suggestive game of the three frolicking French aristocrats. Martha Graham long ago figured out how to depict sexual desire in dance movements that could look inoffensively artistic. No one today would think Dan Sutcliffe is merely using up youthful energy when he dives headfirst to join Mindy Franzese Wild in a series of intricate positions on the oscillating swing. Whee!
In the second sketch, the title and setting (Did You Move?; " An Italian restaurant, Queens, 1954 " ) frame Adam Dannheisser and Meg Howrey as a Mafia brute and his abused wife. But their body language, exaggerated from a hundred gangster flicks, tells us that anyway. He’s so rooted to the ground that he’s almost immobilized, a character with no flexibility. She twitches and shrinks into her hunched shoulders, rocking autistically, sealed in a cocoon of subservience.
When the husband heads for the buffet table, wify goes into a kind of trance, seeing herself as a ballerina. She throws up some high solo arabesques to Anitra’s Dance from Grieg’s Peer Gynt music, then does a pas de deux of whirling lifts with the maître d’ (Gary Franco) to the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin. Finally she confronts hubby in a full-scale rebellion to the farandole from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne.
It’s in this penultimate encounter of the restaurant scene that the ghost of Jerome Robbins, which has been hovering over the production, makes itself most clearly felt. In Robbins’s 1956 The Concert, which is still the perfect dance comedy, a henpecked husband is dragged to a Chopin recital by his shrewish wife. In his dream of revenge, he takes up with a flirtatious butterfly and tries to stab his wife. The ballet ends in a wonderfully choreographed melee of berserk insects, wilis, and hussars, the insulted pianist chasing all of them with a butterfly net. Stroman’s gender-reversed dénouement isn’t half so witty, because when the hulking husband returns, the wife cringes back into compliance, accompanied by Puccini’s " O mio babbino caro. "
Here and throughout the show, everyone mugs and overacts, as if just dancing wouldn’t be enough to keep the audience on track. In the eponymous third piece, a successful but depressed producer of television commercials (Alan Campbell) imagines falling in love with a girl in a swing-dance bar. This girl (Holly Cruikshank) is perpetually posing as unavailable, butt out, bust up, long legs strutting, haughty neck stretched, in a skintight strapless yellow dress. She lindys with the other bar patrons but turns them all down when they proposition her with their trickiest pirouettes. Of course, she’s been holding out for Campbell all along, just waiting for him to get up the rhythm.
Poor Campbell, having succumbed to adolescent social paralysis, just can’t manage to meet her, until, fortified with drinks handed to him by the bartender, he " learns " to dance by kicking his feet in frustration. Right in time to the music. Eventually a fight breaks out when he cuts in on one of the jitterbugs. Shades of Robbins again: Fancy Free and West Side Story.
Campbell wakes up in his apartment with a thud, having failed at the most spectacular of several suicide attempts. On his answering machine, the girl downstairs is complaining about the noise. Next thing you know, she’s knocking on the door in a yellow bathrobe, and guess what? She looks just like the girl in the bar. As they’re about to foxtrot off into the night, he promises to install wall-to-wall carpeting.
Also, Carolyn Clay's review of contact.
