Word: saddler
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Milk and Honey (book by Don Appell; music and lyrics by Jerry Herman; choreography by Donald Saddler) takes a troupe of middle-aged U.S. widows on a tour of Israel in an open search for second love. Making her Broadway musical debut, thimble-sized Molly Picon, 63, is cast as a wily matchmaker who never forgets to bait her own hook. Comedienne Picon mock-droops an eyelid, smacks her lips together as if they were their own best friends, and in the archly mingled inflections of Cupid and cupidity queries each promising male: "What line are you in?" Robert Weede...
...steals the scene is the scene: Israel, with its ethnic freshness and vitality. In Independence Day Hora, the company swirls up a cyclone in a hand-holding folk dance, then explodes in Kazachok-styled kicks and leaps. Here, and in a muscle-throbbing stomp set in the Negev, Choreographer Saddler rises above the dance-for-dance-sake motives of most musicals to salute the pioneer spirit. An artful change of pace from the robust to the exotic brings a Yemenite wedding ceremony, in which the color of spectacle-cloth-of-gold gowns, jeweled headdresses, a pinpricked panoply of tiny candles...
...dance version of Winesburg, Saddler focused on four of the book's most luridly contorted figures: Elizabeth Willard. whose uncontrollable love for her son feeds "the feeble blaze of life that remained in her;" the Peeping-Tom minister, the Rev. Curtis Hartman, who sees God in a naked woman; a love-starved spinster named Alice Hindman; and the local doxy, one Louise Trunnion. As Anderson had done, Choreographer Saddler used the inflamed observations of George Willard, Elizabeth's son and a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle, as the thread to stitch the incidents together...
...Saddler's first sequence has Louise (Dancer Patricia Birsh) weaving about George (Thomas Hasson) in a brash, hip-flicking dance of courtship culminating in a clinch and Louise's exit in Georges arms. "Nobody saw us," he says as he returns breathless to the stage. In the second incident, Alice (Maria Karnilova) rips off her nightgown, thrusts and twists about the stage in a wonderful pantomime of alternate abandon and frustration, finally offers herself to a stranger. "I don't care who he is as long as he is alone," she says, but she is rejected...
What impressed most critics at last week's performance was Saddler's economical evocation of Anderson's mordant visions through the skillful welding of Genevieve Pitot's music with dance and the spoken word. Saddler believes dialogue should be a regular part of the dance: "It's an extension of the emotions." A veteran movie choreographer (April in Paris, Young in Heart), he has danced with Manhattan's Ballet Theater, worked with his own modern dance company. His main concern is perfecting native American dance movements: "I feel that what I ought to dance...