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The dance floor never clears in the bustling nightclub of “Come Fly Away,” Twyla Tharp’s celebration of the music of Frank Sinatra and the heated urgings behind the love songs he performed with such supple sensitivity.
In this dazzling new dance musical, which opened Thursday night at the Marquis Theater, Ms. Tharp deploys a stage full of brilliant performers to heighten the theatrical allure of ballroom dance, complementing the immortal appeal of Sinatra’s singing with movement that captures the underlying emotional tensions in it. The yearning to connect and the impulse toward flight — those contradictory verities of romantic entanglement — take sharp visceral form in Ms. Tharp’s fast, flashing, remarkably intricate dances.
As the brooding or bouncing voice of Sinatra embraces the dancers in a cool caress — who needs dialogue when the Chairman is on the job? — their arcing legs become both emblems of attraction and defensive weapons. The jutting of a hip can signal seduction, rejection or irritation. A classic ballet pose — the arabesque — is imbued with defiance or delight. Dance is both formal and sensual, tightly structured and wildly abandoned, translating the evolving rhythms of human courtship into eye-popping movement.
Ms. Tharp, who previously created Broadway shows performed to the songs of Billy Joel (the hit “Movin’ Out”) and Bob Dylan (the flop “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”), has been choreographing to Sinatra songs since the 1970s. For “Come Fly Away” she has dipped only lightly into the well of her past work, employing a few celebrated pas de deux, most spectacularly the tempestuous tug of war to the shrugging anthem of survival “That’s Life.” This electrifying encounter occurs midway through the first act, as Hank and Kate, the characters portrayed by Keith Roberts and Karine Plantadit, drop the blithe familiarity of their friendly initial encounter to reveal the grittier truth of their undeniable attraction.
Ms. Tharp takes her cue from the building defiance in Sinatra’s singing to create a charged confrontation between two equals, a man who seeks to possess, and a woman who will not be possessed. Mr. Roberts, his chiseled jaw set and his eyes boring into his partner, flings Ms. Plantadit to the ground and yanks her slowly back up. She plays at submission — curling her astonishing limbs to obey his will — before unleashing her own powers of steely resistance, fiercely contemptuous of the idea that a man can capture a woman’s soul with the grip of a hand.
Continually twisting from his embrace even as she delights in the animal force of their interaction, she gives as good as she gets, and in the end slinks off to prowl for other diversions. The audience, meanwhile, is left agog at both the intensity of the dance and the searing emotion beneath it.
The pas de deux as a flirtatious battle of wills is a recurring theme in “Come Fly Away,” which is structured as a series of romantic encounters in a club vaguely redolent of the 1940s. The set design, by James Youmans, features Deco lines and some kitschy details. The sparkly backdrop is a little trite, and the costumes by Katherine Roth are likewise glossy pastiches of period classics, slick suits for the men and silky wrap dresses for the women. But pop love songs thrive on cliché; it takes singers like Sinatra to rub the polish off them to reveal the eternal truths underneath, and a choreographer like Ms. Tharp (who also directed) to push against the obvious and release new facets of the songs’ energies.
Continue reading this article here:http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/theater/reviews/26fly.html
Cool!
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