CONTACT
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At the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 W. 65th St., Lincoln Center; (212) 239-6200.
For a special New York Pulse series, Post critic Clive Barnes has been revisiting Broadway favorites to see how they hold up over time.
JUST which is the best musical currently on Broadway could be disputed – but the luckiest is undeniably the Susan Stroman and John Weidman dancical “Contact,” now in its third serendipitous year at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre.
In this, the show that won the 2000 Tony for Best Musical, nobody actually sings, the music is not simply old but recorded, and the entire “musical” is in effect nothing but three ballets. Go figure.
It’s not even as though Stroman’s dances are of unusual merit. Though she’s a splendid, imaginative Broadway choreographer, she doesn’t have the technical expertise or choreographic originality to sustain an entire evening.
But her direction of the show is expert, and some of Weidman’s dramaturgy, particularly in the third ballet, the eponymously named “Contact,” proves intriguing.
This, a kind of danse noir about a burnt-out, suicidally inclined advertising executive who finds salvation through a mysterious Girl in a Yellow Dress is by far the better part of the evening.
As I wrote when the show was new: “If you believe your time is money, frugally plan your arrival to coincide with the intermission.”
The two early ballets leave me, as they did originally, as chilly and unimpressed as an Eskimo in an icebox.
The first is the old sex-on-a-chandelier joke given a little artsiness by imitating Fragonard’s famous painting “The Swing,” with a swinging twist at the end.
The second piece, concerning the modestly danced-out fantasies of a Mafia wife bullied by her husband in a badly run Italian restaurant, is every bit as exciting as canned spaghetti.
However, as Arthur Miller noted more than half-a-century ago, some people, and presumably some shows, are just born lucky. And the luck of “Contact” has yet to wear out.
It has recently had a complete oil-change of principals but is running as smoothly as ever.
As the girl in the naughty swing, newcomer Joanne Manning is boisterously sexy, while in “Did You Move?” – that’s the Italian restaurant number “Sopranos”-style – the enchanting Karen Ziemba has been replaced by the equally enchanting Charlotte d’Amboise.
For the closing “Contact” number, Colleen Dunn is a shade or so less femme fatale than the original Girl in Yellow, Deborah Yates, but to compensate there is Alan Campbell, who’s even more desperate, charming and convincing than Boyd Gaines was.
If you’re looking for an evening of dance, why not stroll across the Lincoln Center plaza to either New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater? Both the dancing and the choreography will be better. They even have something with an orchestra – it’s called live music.