Press Telegram By: John Ferrell
Hard to believe that a music style that first became popular over 70 years
ago can still bring a crowd to its feet. Hard to believe that something believed
to be appreciated mostly by teenagers in 1930 is still going strong in another
century. "Swing!" the Broadway music-and -dance review named after
the musical style, which also had a revival in the late 1980s and early '90s
brought that music and other styles it engendered - as well as the athletic
dancing style of the 1930s and 1940s associated with it - to Broadway in 1999,
where it found a huge audience. Now, Musical Theatre West, as part of its
49th season, is bringing "Swing!" to the Carpenter Performing Arts
Center at Cal State Long Beach in a production that runs weekends through
February 24th. The production opened Saturday night and was just the kind
of feel-good musical that wakes up an audience and deserves a standing ovation
at evening's end. Not much of substance happens, to be sure: There is no story,
just a grab bag of songs from the last 70 years, some familiar ones were re-orchestrated
and altered to the point where, occasionally, they were only marginally recognizable.
A purist could argue that much of this music wasn't really swing music, a
type of music produced for less than two decades. And the on-stage band didn't
always manage to swing what they were playing, being hardly unanimous about
rhythm, tempo and entrances in general. But what the band lacked in perfection,
it made up, for the most part, in enthusiasm and energy. That energy it caught,
in part, from the young and athletic cast of singers and dancers who brought
the songs to life in numbers choreographed by Dana Solimando and directed
by Larry Sousa. The dance numbers, staged in front of a 1940s bandstand, were
startlingly energetic, with bodies frequently flying through the air, only
to be caught just before disaster. All this was set to music by Count Basie
and Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer and Benny Goodman, Louis Prima and Jerome
Kern. There were moments of great musical energy in Saturday's performance.
Rachel Lynn Oliver's rendition of "Blues in the Night," with dance
accompaniment by Cate Caplin and Kevin Gaudin, was smoky and dark, and it
brought the house down. But it was followed by a version of "Boogie Woogie
Bugle Boy" that featured a trumpet solo (no bugle apparently being available)
and a boogie-woogie beat that was barely discernable. Singer-dancer Danny
Michaels opened the evening with a rousing vocal version of Ellington's "It
Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" which set the tone for
the evening (and gave its name to another Broadway musical, incidentally.)
From there on, the stage was filled with activity, much of it defined by the
song title "Throw That Girl Around." There was plenty of cleverness,
including a scat-song love duet, costumes that reminded everyone of the 1940s,
and jolts of electric energy from the dozen dancers who never seemed to tire
of flying through the air. Notable among them were Jessica Dillan and Murray
Phillips in "Dancers in Love," and Rod Harrelson and Desiree Duarte,
with Michaels singing, in "Kitchen Mechanic's Night Out." "Swing!"
is a dessert of a musical, not an intellectual challenge. There is a bitter
taste of the blues spread thinly through the sweetness fo the evening, with
the final result being an evening that is satisfying but not really nutritive;
lively and lovely and thrilling, and enough to bring the opening-night audience
to its feet. A challenge well-met by Musical Theatre West, which is the first
regional theater to produce "Swing!" and an evening of music worth
seeking out.
