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Still tall
Tommy Tune lights up Waltham
BY IRIS FANGER
Tune-ing Up
Featuring Tommy Tune and the Manhattan Rhythm Kings. Music director and conductor Michael Biagi. Presented by Reagle Players Celebrity Series, Waltham (closed).


Like the eternal verities, the essence of the dancer does not change, no matter the age. There on the stage of the packed high-school auditorium in Waltham of all places, stood Tommy Tune. Or, to be more specific: there he tapped, sashayed, swayed, waltzed, shimmied, and shuffled off to Buffalo as if he were a vaudevillean shot on cue from the wings. And in Tune manner familiar from the Broadway shows that have brought him nine Tony Awards as performer, choreographer, or director, he came surrounded by the trappings of a mini musical production: a full-size, on-stage swing band; a trio of singers/dancers/musicians known as the Manhattan Rhythm Kings to back him up; and a rainbow–colored wardrobe of satin top hats and tails studded with rhinestones. Never mind that the man is 64 and has gray streaks in his mop of hair. He has not lost his charismatic presence on stage or his amazing ability to dance as if the spirit of Terpsichore were coursing through his 6’6" body and out his ever-moving feet.

Tune introduced himself, his life, and his colleagues as if he had been inspired by Oprah. What followed alternated segments of shmoozing with numbers that paid homage to those song-and-dance men who came before him, performers ranging from the old-time hoofers to Fred Astaire to the late grand old man of tap, Honi Coles, one of Tune’s co-stars in the 1983 Gershwin musical My One and Only.

The audience went wild over a Q&A session in which a woman in the audience asked Tune whether he remembered her from his days as a graduate teaching assistant in the dance department at the University of Texas. He brought her up on stage; she giggled and wept in embarrassment and admitted to having had a crush on him back then. As Tune remarked in a later context, what he was shoveling here was verisimilitude, a theatrical word that means "the illusion of truth": the lady was a plant. In that context, one wonders about the boy in the audience who said he was a dancer who was always teased in school and asked whether Tune had ever suffered the same treatment. Tune, who is gay, replied with a story about being in junior high when he was called a queer and ran to the dictionary in the school library to check out the meaning.

The theme of the show was announced at the top with a sing-along to "Everything Old Is New Again" and the warning not to look for "heavy metal here." Dancing to numbers from the American songbook by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and others, Tune and the Manhattan Rhythm Kings presented a series of choreographed skits embedded with such Tune trademark moves as unison patterns, the conga line, and the swinging-gate formation, all of them enhanced by elaborate gestures. The styles changed from jazz to Latin to a precise prancing through a film noir spoof set to "Shanghai Lil."

The most successful group number, which Tune attributed to Astaire, was "The Afterbeat," a patter song accompanied by a clever variant on the unison conga line. But the high point of the intermissionless 90-minute evening came when Tune just put his hands in his pockets and danced alone in the old soft-shoe style to "They Can’t Take That Away from Me." The purity of the movement, the focus from inside out, was reminder enough that this master of the dance does not need gimmicks.

Tune has left Broadway for other gigs (most recently these have included two years and 900 performances at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas in a spectacular entertainment called EFX and starring with the Kings in last season’s White Tie and Tails, an Off Broadway show that did not last). You might well ask why. As a performer, he has all the gifts. He loves being in the spotlight, and he makes it look easy, but he’s a creative man whose abilities go well beyond reviving dance numbers of times past. Has the tumult of directing and choreographing new works for Broadway become too much for him? Let’s hope not.


Issue Date: September 19 - 25, 2003
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