Holley Farmer and John Selya in Come Fly Away. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
By Hap Erstein
Eight years ago, Twyla Tharp won the Tony Award for choreography, using the music of Billy Joel for her quirky, alternately graceful and clumsy leaps and lifts in a show called Movin’ Out.
The Playbill program for it contained a three-paragraph synopsis of the plot – something about couples drifting apart as the guys went off to the war in Vietnam and then eventually coming home to the difficult readjustment of peacetime. The dance was enjoyable to watch, if gradually rather repetitive, but try as I might, I never really saw that story played out onstage.
Now comes Tharp again with Come Fly Away, set to music popularized by Frank Sinatra. In fact, it’s set to recordings of Sinatra accompanied by a live orchestra and, occasionally, he sings duets with a live female band vocalist.
There is no plot synopsis this time, and I would say virtually no plot, but a series of couples who meet and become intertwined, physically and romantically, at a nightclub. Oh, and during the second act, much of their clothing falls away, so that they dance in their skivvies, which is always a plus.
It is an enjoyable evening’s dance concert, though it insists that it is a “musical,” and seems to stretch that term’s definition to the breaking point. The choice of individual Sinatra songs – there are 34 in all during the evening – seems exceedingly arbitrary. And while the program lists character names, there is no dialogue and no way to know who is who other than matching faces with Playbill photos.
Still, Tharp’s eccentric choreography remains compelling and she has gathered some terrific, seemingly tireless dancers to execute it. And the way this season is going, she seems like to win the choreography Tony again. She could win two if there were an award for Best Dance Concert.
During the day Thursday, I did another interview for the coming season, with Rob Roth and Matt West, the director and choreographer of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which is coming to the Kravis Center next season in a newly redesigned production.
As Roth concedes, they have finally solved the problem of the ineffectual wolves, which looked like cardboard yappers originally, and will now be represented by menacing puppets – is that a contradiction in terms? – by Basil Twist, the guy who designed the puppets for The Addams Family.
The hardest part of the interview was finding Roth and West. They had suggested meeting at the Starbucks at Rockefeller Center. That sounded fine, but, like a punch line to a Jackie Mason routine, there are two separate Starbucks in Rockefeller Center, a dilemma that was further complicated by the fact that I did not know what Roth and West looked like.
Alas, they wore no Beauty and the Beast jackets or caps, but I took a calculated guess, found them and now know far more about the show − which thanks to the Disney marketing machine is the seventh longest-running musical in Broadway history − than I ever wanted to. More on this eventually.
Next: The African musical Fela!