When the characters in a Broadway musical have emotions too big for speech, they sing, and when their feelings grow too large for song, they dance. Or so goes an old maxim cited in the recently opened Broadway musical “Schmigadoon!”
But choreography can also communicate in quotations and callbacks. Steps can fit one story while alluding to others — an effect that might evoke nostalgia or make you laugh or do both at once.
Of the shows nominated in the Best Choreography of the Tony Awards this year, “The Rocky Horror Show” plays on memories of the 1975 movie with aptly third-rate dancing. “The Lost Boys” evokes the thrills of its 1987 film source with flight on hidden wires. And “Ragtime” tosses in a few cakewalk steps to suggest its Edwardian era. But two of the productions are especially referential: “Schmigadoon” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”
In “Schmigadoon,” based on the recent Apple TV + series, Melissa and Josh, whose relationship is on the rocks, get trapped in a fantasyland that’s a mash-up of Golden Age musicals like “Brigadoon,” “The King and I” and “Finian’s Rainbow.” The characters, plotlines and songs echo those shows in loving parody, and so does the pitch-perfect choreography by Christopher Gattelli, who also directs.
“Jellicle Ball” takes Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s blockbuster musical “Cats” (1981) and transplants it to a competition in the queer ballroom tradition. The choreography, by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, sometimes points its tail at the style of the original production. More often, it draws on dips, duckwalks and hand motions of vogueing, among other conventions of the ballroom milieu.
In both shows, the dance references cater to some clued-in audience members and go over the heads of others. But all the choreographers stressed in interviews that they didn’t intend to leave anyone out. “I don’t want people to feel like they’re missing anything,” Gattelli said, “but when I put those moments in, it deepens the experience for those who do know.”
So to help deepen the experience for everyone, here are some footnotes to the footwork, an annotation of a few choreographic allusions.
Schmigadoon
“It’s honoring all my heroes,” Gattelli said of his “Schmigadoon” choreography, listing Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd among other dance-making luminaries of stage and screen. “The show is calling on everything I loved growing up. About the only thing I didn’t get in was the bottle dance from ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’”
The pastiche numbers glue together scrapbook memories from multiple shows and even as far afield as Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations.” A dance that seems to derive from “The Music Man” might sneak in a gesture from “The Sound of Music.” The very silly ensemble routine “Corn Puddin’” is a folksy romp in the mode of “A Real Nice Clambake” from “Carousel”; it begins like the barn dance in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
One of Gattelli’s favorite Easter eggs comes from “Oklahoma!” The long dream ballet that de Mille created for the end of Act 1 was a landmark in the integration of dance into the narrative of Broadway musicals. It embodies the sexual anxiety of Laurie, the musical’s heroine, and reveals things she doesn’t know about herself. Each of the main characters was replaced with a dance double.
In one part, Laurie’s friends celebrate the news of her engagement by patting the air twice, a fluttering, pulsating gesture that de Mille once described as “hearts beating.”
In “Schmigadoon,” the reference is worked in at a turn in the story when Josh and Melissa have split up and he is wistfully remembering how they met: trying to get a vending machine to disgorge her purchase. The machine materializes out of the fog of memory, and a dancer representing Melissa glides on in pointe shoes. Extending a leg in a balletic arabesque, she pats the air as if banging on glass.
At another point, Melissa is wooed by Danny Bailey, a carnival barker like Billy Bigelow in “Carousel.” His song “You Can’t Tame Me” is chockablock with quotations. When he jumps up on a ring-the-bell hammer game, he does so in the manner of Gene Kelly swinging on a lamppost in “Singin’ in the Rain.”
“That’s Melissa’s favorite movie,” Gattelli said, “which the audience knows because we show the movie poster above her bed. It makes sense that the first man she’s attracted to would have a Gene Kelly quality to him.”
Most audience members can probably catch that reference, but the end of the number squeezes in two deep-cut allusions in quick succession. One is a bit of trampoline bouncing, borrowed from a dance by Tommy Rall in the 1953 film of “Kiss Me Kate”:
Another is a flurry of balloon-popping kicks taken from a Donald O’Connor number in the movie “Call Me Madam” (1953):
“With a lot of these moments,” Gattelli said, “people may not know what movie or show it’s from, but it feels period and it takes people back into that world.”
Cats: The Jellicle Ball
The dance allusions in “Jellicle Ball” start as soon as the music does. Above the stage, we see the silhouette of a dancer with cat ears and a tail. The stretched-out ballet-jazz moves look like Gillian Lynne’s choreography for the original production of “Cats.”
But then the dancer slips into the flexed-wrist posing of vogue — later sinking into the deep crouch of a duckwalk and combining a grand pirouette with an extravagantly splayed dip.
“We want people to know, yes, this is ‘Cats,’” Wiles said. “But also, this is ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball.’ Having it morph helps the audience see where we’re going.”
Another quote from the original show comes when all the dancers crawl toward the moon.
“That’s something really memorable from the original musical,” Wiles said. “We just made it a little more ballroom, with a funny hair flip.”
Much of “Jellicle Ball” alludes to the history of queer ballroom. It incorporates categories of competition, tributes to founding mothers and even cast members who are themselves important figures in the scene, like Junior LeBeija, who appeared as an M.C. in the seminal 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning.”
One section of the number “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat” draws on the lineage of vogueing, setting the style called “Old Way,” on the left, against a later one called “New Way,” right.
“In ‘Old Way’ the lines and shapes are more stiff and stern,” Lyons said, “while ‘New Way’ is more flexible and stretchy.”
“Both styles are part of the evolution of vogue,” Wiles said. “It was really important that we paid homage to that legacy.”
But some of the dance allusions in “Jellicle Ball” aren’t from ballroom or “Cats.” When DJ Griddlebone, a character new to this production, takes the stage, the dancers break into the swinging arms and rolling torsos of West African dance.
“The music there is for the character of Macavity,” Wiles said. In “Jellicle Ball,” Macavity is played by Leiomy Maldonado, a ballroom celebrity known for her signature hair flip as well as appearances on the FX series “Pose” and the HBO Max ballroom competition show “Legendary.”
“But Ken Ard, the actor playing DJ Griddlebone, played Macavity in the original Broadway production,” Wiles explained. “Having the dancers circle him with West African movement is to honor him with a throne moment, like ‘This is the king.’”
Let the memories dance again.
The post A Guide to the Dance Quotes and Callbacks on Broadway appeared first on New York Times.
