Word: gang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...main complaint about Big Deal is that for every element that is new, there is something old, something borrowed and something very blue. The plot, about an amiable gang of two-bit black crooks trying to burgle a Chicago pawnshop, is adapted from a 1958 Italian film, Big Deal on Madonna Street. Fosse, who wrote the book, stubbornly resisted advice to simplify the narrative, prune out tasteless jokes involving a urinal and a simulated oral- sex act, add more dance and brighten what he admitted was a "melancholy" ending. The score, too, is recycled: standards from...
Cleavant Derricks, who won a Tony in the show-business musical Dreamgirls, finds a kind of heroism as Big Deal's hapless gang leader, a onetime boxer who keeps getting knocked down by life and rising to scrabble anew. His Dreamgirls partner Loretta Devine brings off an almost impossible mix as a housemaid duped into abetting the robbery: she is sexy, touchingly innocent, screamingly funny and, perhaps most astonishing in a feminist era, inoffensively but decisively dumb...
...flying colors as they acted out a day in the life of a 10-year-old playing hookey from school. Weaving in and out of an oversized erector set for the stage, the kids and their teachers danced their interpretations of events from a city life, ranging from a gang fight to trying on a new pair of shoes...
Donald McKayle choreographed the next piece, "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," describing the experiences of men on a chain gang in the South in the early 20th century. The dance alternated between scenes of the men at work and sketches of the men's dreams about their sweethearts, mothers and wives. Like "Blues Suite," this work gives the men in the company an opportunity to demonstrate their technical brilliance when dancing in an ensemble...
...choreography includes kicks, stag leaps and sharp arm movements that create a heavy, staccato feeling. This tone is compounded by the men's ability to dance in unison and in rhythm with the percussion that plays throughout. McKayle intersperses painful expressions of work in the chain gang--throwing fists into the air, clasping hands and stamping feet on the floor--with a flirtatious duet that lightens this somber piece that ends with a gunshot and a man's death...