TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020689/02068900.059

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.5 KB | 72 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 80

Gorgeous Fun, but Not Funky


By William A. Henry III


    BLACK AND BLUE
    Conceived by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli

    Infuse a 1940s Harlem nightclub act with a Busby Berkeley
film's lavish budget, elbow room and staging style, restrain
the raunch and remove the racial bitterness. The result: Black
and Blue, the sumptuously spectacular $5 million revue that
opened last week on Broadway. If Fred and Ginger had been black
and still able to live in that elegant fantasy world, their
shows might have looked a lot like this: rows of tap dancers in
tailcoats or scarlet evening gowns; vast sets like lacquered
jewel boxes gliding across the floor and opening to reveal a
kick line; a singer in a swing, wearing a cloak that billows 18
ft. down to the floor.

    Is the experience authentic? Can the blues be legitimately
sung for 2 1/2 hours with barely a glimmer of rage or pain?
Would W.C. Handy and Fats Waller recognize anything except their
own music? In truth, not much that is funky survives the
onslaught of feathers and sequins. During I Can't Give You
Anything but Love, a song about poverty, the stage is aswirl
with what looks like gold and diamonds. The title number, which
was wrenchingly performed this season in Ain't Misbehavin', is
used here to bring on a choral stomp. Almost perversely, the
blues, an art rooted in specific American history, is
methodically detached from its context, as if the past were so
much soil to be brushed from the roots of an ornamental shrub
destined for transplant.

    Yet as a showcase for remarkable performers and the visual
panache of its creators, Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli
(Tango Argentino, Flamenco Puro), this is gorgeous and joyous
entertainment. And in its reverence for veteran talents, the
kind who have bounced from headlining to working as kitchen help
and back again, the show is faithful to the folkloric traditions
of tap, jazz and blues.

    Ruth Brown, who can still shout down the rafters in St.
Louis Blues, shows her kittenish side and trademark mock anger
in the double entendre If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' on
It. Her husky, lisping Body and Soul, however, comes off as a
Carol Channing impersonation. Linda Hopkins, a 1972 Tony winner
(Inner City), finds dignity in Come Sunday but loses it in her
gleeful giggling about wife beating in T'aint Nobody's Bizness
if I Do. While Carrie Smith displays a howitzer voice in I Want
a Big Butter and Egg Man, she overdecorates the end of Am I Blue
and dissipates the emotional payoff. All three, given their
ample proportions, should have questioned the white feathered
dresses for the finale that make them look like ostriches with
glandular problems.

    The dancing opens with a traditional tap challenge, each
man showing his best stuff in turn. Savion Glover, 15, who
enacted The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway in 1983, is predictably
upstaged by such snowy-haired hoofers as Bunny Briggs, Lon
Chaney and Ralph Brown. Glover reappears in a breakneck
gymnastic number, hopping up and down stairs, while his elders
return in slow, sentimental sequences to demonstrate the
traditional tap presumption that less can be more. That is in
contrast to the basic notion of Black and Blue, which seems to
be that more is more. Yet in the understated moments when the
stage is all but bare save for a performer at home with his
craft, the show attains magic that could satisfy the haut monde
and Harlem alike.