Theatre in Review: Gotta Dance! (York Theatre Company/Theatre at St. Jean's)

	Photo: Bjorn Bolinder

This new revue, consisting of numbers from hit Broadway shows and the odd film, offers a powerful reminder of what dance can contribute to musical theatre, namely, drama and delight. It's a message that can't be expressed often enough. In fact, I'd like to bus a few dozen or so contemporary choreographers uptown to the Theatre at St. Jean's for a quick refresher course in the uses of their art; they could only benefit from it.

If nothing else, such a captive audience would have a good time. They could shiver with pleasure as Jessica Lee Goldyn defies the laws of anatomy in "I'm a Brass Band," from Sweet Charity, turning her legs and arms inward and then, busting loose, leading a high-stepping parade up a Manhattan street. They could thrill to the inherent theatricality of "Cool," from West Side Story, in which a gang of toughs pulls together, bodies taut with tension, shoulder to shoulder, before blowing apart, shooting to every corner of the stage, Or they could revel in Georgina Pazcoguin, Barton Cowperthwaite, and Taylor Stanley, slyly exploring the geometry of the eternal triangle of "Mr. Monotony," from Jerome Robbins' Broadway. (This Irving Berlin rarity was a perpetual orphan, getting cut from both Miss Liberty and Call Me Madam -- two wildly different shows -- and the film Easter Parade, before Robbins found a use for it in his retrospective revue. At the York, Afra Hines introduces its insinuating melody and lyrics with the appropriate sizzle.)

Gotta Dance! is a presentation of the revived American Dance Machine, a troupe dedicated to preserving important pieces of musical theatre staging. Founded by Lee Becker Theodore, the original Anybodys in West Side Story and a choreographer of some note, it made a splash in the 1970s, then languished for decades. I caught a 2015 presentation at the Joyce Theater, featuring some of the numbers seen in the current attraction. It was packed with gems but often felt ragged and under-rehearsed, with less-than-optimum lighting and sound design.

Here, under the direction of Nikki Feirt Atkins and Randy Skinner, working with a battery of stagers (among them Robert La Fosse, Donna McKechnie, and Baayork Lee), nearly everything is greatly improved. The performances are more precise, the atmosphere more exuberant. Ken Billington's lighting, whether hitting the downbeats of "Simply Irresistible," from Contact or using sinister white side washes to carve out "The Manson Trio" from Pippin, infallibly strikes the right mood. Peter Bruckner's sound design is blessedly intelligible, a must-have quality when the lyrics are by Sondheim, Edward Kleban, or Dorothy Fields. (Listening to "I'm a Brass Band," with its many musical references, one must wonder: Is there a more startling couplet than "I'm the bells of St. Peter's in Rome/I'm tissue paper on a comb?")

Not everything works. "Broadway Melody," from the film Singin' in the Rain, falls flat because its most memorable moments -- an extended leg acting as a stop sign and tool of seduction, an insolent puff of smoke in an innocent face, a George Raft goon menacingly tossing a coin -- are made for the camera, not the stage. (On the other hand, "Moses Supposes," from Singin' in the Rain, has the propulsive energy of several wind turbines, thanks to the ebullient Jess LeProtto and that marionette-like collection of loosely linked limbs named Brandon Burks.) "Simply Irresistible" doesn't excerpt well; it's perhaps the only number that doesn't build in excitement as it goes along. And for all her pizzazz in her upbeat numbers - for example, seismically rattling the white fringe on her sheath dress in "Teach Me How to Shimmy" from Smokey Joe's Cafe -- Goldyn doesn't quite connect with the inherent psychodrama of "The Music and the Mirror," from A Chorus Line. (It didn't help that, at the performance I attended, she developed serious pitch problems during this number.) If Marlene Olson Hamm's costumes, which often pay tribute to the original show's designs, get the job done, Brian C. Staton's projections could use a slicker, more evocative style.

Still, at a time when so much musical theatre choreography consists of joyless gymnastics unrelated to plot, character, or mise en scene, Gotta Dance! is a powerful corrective. Whether it's LeProtto and Deanna Doyle enacting the touching character sketch "All I Need Is the Girl," from Gypsy; Kendall LeShanti, unmanning her male companions with a bump and grind in "Sweet Georgia Brown," from Bubbling Brown Sugar; or a sextet tapping their way (sometimes while seated!) in "I Love a Piano" from the stage version of White Christmas, there are serious pleasures to be had. Gotta Dance! isn't perfect, but it knows what it's about. And these days, that's a lot. --David Barbour