Word: stomp
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...what really 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...
That U.S.-hip-sounding line, strangely enough, is as British as "jolly good," or "raw-ther." It describes a musical fad that has washed over Britain. "Trad" is traditional jazz, the 1920s variety now in booming revival, and fans are streaming to hear it at stomp centers from Scotland's isle of Arran to an old dance hall on Eel Pie Island off Twickenham in the Thames, where Henry VIII once twitted his mistresses while eating the best eel pie in the kingdom. Bankers, clerks and beardless youths, secretaries, bus conductors, doctors, bricklayers, teachers-the traddists are a class...
...even the stately BBC has begun to show its hips: a new TV series began last month, called The Trad Fad. With a clear and poundingly straightforward beat that avoids the more intricate mathematics of modern jazz, trad centers in such items as Tiger Rag and Cushion Foot Stomp, but often goes absolutely daft with kick-me-baby versions of things like Billy Boy and In a Persian Garden...
Elsewhere, reactions were mixed. Roseland, a staid, family waltzery near Broadway, banned La Pachanga because it feared for its floor. Freddy Alonso, an El Morocco bandleader, played pachangas but reported sadly that someone had knocked over a table while essaying the stomp. It is "just not El Morocco," according to one patron, to wave one's handkerchief while pachangaing...
...into record shops everywhere; across the nation the hopeful hip are beginning to ask for lessons. In Manhattan, the Astaire Studios and Arthur Murray's were offering instruction up to the Ph.D. level, including such variations as the Under Arm Step, the Indian Hop, and the Kennedy Stomp. But even the experts still seemed somewhat confused. "The Pachanga," Arthur Murray pronounced sagely, "is gay and fun and sexless." Clearly, Murray had been watching the Palladium's handkerchiefs, not its skirts...