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Almost irresistible
Susan Stroman makes contact with Boston
BY CAROLYN CLAY

contact
Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. Written by John Weidman. Sets by Thomas Lynch. Costumes by William Ivey Long. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Sound by Scott Stauffer. With Keith Kühl, Mindy Franzese Wild, Dan Sutcliffe, Meg Howrey, Adam Dannheisser, Gary Franco, Alan Campbell, and Holly Cruikshank. At the Colonial Theatre through January 13.


You could call contact the E.M. Forster musical — if it were in the strict sense a musical. Some have groused that, given its lack of an original score or anyone to sing it, it’s not. And the musicians’ union tried to keep the show, which won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical, out of competition on the grounds that all of its music — ranging from Rodgers & Hart to Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Bizet to Louis Prima, the Beach Boys, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers — is taped. But whatever the dance-driven contact is, it’s the shimmying embodiment of Forster’s dictum " Only connect! "

A triptych of danced fantasies rooted in the human need for connection (with minimal, mostly pedestrian dialogue), contact is the brainchild of hot director/choreographer Susan Stroman. She created the title piece at the behest of Lincoln Center honcho André Bishop, and it was so enthusiastically received that the slighter, shorter pieces that precede it were cooked up to create a loosely themed evening. No surprise then that contact — the tale of a suicidal ad man garnering a new lease on life through a dream of a girl in a swing-dance dive — remains the soul of contact. The other pieces are but bursts of intimation of the liberating power of dance. (There’s also a droll prop connection between the show’s beginning and its end that brings it full circle.)

In the 1767-set Swinging, which is inspired by the Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting The Swing and set to Stephane Grappelli’s jazzy rendition of " My Heart Stood Still, " a bewigged aristocrat and his coral-clad lady gambol while a bare-chested servant mans a swing. In the copulative ballet that ensues when the master pops off for more bubbly, Stroman sows the first inklings of exhilaration. But things are not what they seem in this brief, Pinteresque vignette, its charm slightly diminished by Mindy Franzese Wild’s exaggeration of the lady’s mincing coyness.

In playwriting terms, we move from Pinter to Mamet for the second piece, the aptly titled Did You Move? Set in an Italian restaurant in Queens circa 1954, the piece focuses on the abused wife of a mobster of few bullying words. Every time he heads off stage to the buffet, the lighting starts to swim and she seeks refuge in giddily freeing fantasies set to well-known dance music. It all culminates in an orgiastic showdown involving the maître d’, all the restaurant’s staff and clientele, a pastry cart as chariot, and a gun — set to the triumphant bum-bum-bum of the farandole from Bizet’s incidental music for L’Arlésienne. When I saw this piece in New York, Karen Ziemba captured both the silliness and the poignancy of the wife’s balletic escapes; here Meg Howrey is appealingly, gracefully goofy but misses the despair.

After intermission comes contact, which is, despite its somewhat laborious context, in the titular words of the Robert Palmer hit that’s its most exuberant number, simply irresistible. Alan Campbell is Michael Wiley, a successful but lonely director of commercials who’s following his latest Clio win with a drunk, dark night of the soul. Lamely attempting suicide and spurred by the messages on his answering machine, he imagines himself in an after-hours swing-dance club that dangles salvation in the form of an iconic " Girl in a Yellow Dress. " Trouble is, dance is her language, and he has two left feet.

Drifting between consciousness and dream, Michael watches in klutzy, infatuated desperation as the impossibly elegant and supple Girl is importuned by one swain after another. As she waves some off and accepts others, the company puts on a show of slinky, infectious couple dancing to tunes that range from Dion’s " Runaround Sue " to the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ " Put a Lid on It. " The bartender points out that these folks don’t talk about themselves much; they just dance. And if Michael wants to converse with Holly Cruikshank’s cool, sinewy, yellow-clad goddess (who can do a full split while standing), the ad man, clinging to the bar as if it were a dock, will have to take the plunge. Finally he does, to the jazzy strains of " Sing, Sing, Sing, " which blossoms into a Jets/Sharks-type number, the company acting the part of an undulating maze between Michael and his Beatrice.

A dance-theater hybrid best buoyed by movement, contact bewitched me more on first than second viewing. But at its sinuous, syncopated, and non-verbal best, as in " Simply Irresistible, " it scores. Just one question: why are they selling trademarked baseball hats in the lobby when any exiting female would pay a fortune for a knockoff of that lemon-hued sartorial siren call of a dress?

Also, Marcia B. Siegel's review of contact.

 

Issue Date: January 3-10, 2002
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