Word: stroman
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...creatively dead on arrival (any Andrew Lloyd Webber show). Yes, Stephen Sondheim still strikes sparks, while a few up-and-comers, especially Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins), show signs of vibrant life. But it's long past time for something really fresh. Contact, the exhilarating dance play by choreographer Susan Stroman and writer John Weidman that opened last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is just what the play doctor ordered...
Contact consists of three spoken one-act dramas--Stroman calls them short stories--performed by dancer-actors and accompanied by a delectably eclectic jukebox of recordings by everybody from Benny Goodman and Stephane Grappelli to Robert Palmer and the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Nobody onstage sings a note. In Swinging, Fragonard's 1767 painting of an aristocratic young lady (Stephanie Michels) frolicking in a forest glade becomes a real-life menage a trois even kinkier than it looks. Did You Move?, set in an Italian restaurant in Queens circa 1954, is a bittersweet vignette about an unhappy housewife (Karen Ziemba...
...have a musical without singers?--but the results are magical, especially when seen on the three-quarter-round stage of a theater so intimate that you can look every performer right in the eye. "We use real theater dancers, Broadway dancers, because they're such strong actors," Stroman explains. "It's almost like a dance company and an acting company coming together." The feel is that of a trio of exquisitely tooled MGM-style production numbers, but updated (Fred Astaire didn't use the F word in The Band Wagon) and given emotional weight. Each playlet is peopled with lonely...
...been carried to Broadway by far more favorable winds. It has a score by Kander and Ebb--once again toasts of the town, thanks to the hit revival of their 1975 show, Chicago--and a premise that seems made to order for the team and for talented choreographer Susan Stroman: a 1930s dance marathon in Atlantic City. The show is cannily mounted, bouncy and often tuneful, professional all the way. Yet it's still a disappointment...
...more obvious message of the new Carol is that it's big and pretty -- holiday candy for the whole family at $19 to $55 a ticket. It was confected by Broadway's top talent, including set designer Tony Walton, costume designer William Ivey Long, choreographer Susan Stroman and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. Some are working at half speed. Menken's melodies are less inventive than his scores for the Disney cartoons The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He gets a B+ for hummable ballads and ho-humbuggable comic turns. Stroman's jazziest ideas are reprises of her dancing...