©The New York Daily News
Dec. 10, 1999


The Old Song & Dance
By Fintan O'Toole

Sure, Swing! is good fun, but it's weird to mine the past on eve of the new century.

Imagine that it is the year 2049 and you are walking along Broadway. In one theater, there's "Grunge!", in another "Punk Rock!", in a third "Rap.

If you're the right age, you may be flushed with nostalgia. But you may also wonder why this brave new world has to get its kicks by recycling the styles and moods of the past.

The new show Swing! prompts similarly mixed feelings. It is an ebullient and enjoyable return to the rhythms that were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s. But it also seems just a little ironic that the last new musical to debut on Broadway in the 1990s should owe so much to a previous era.

In that sense, Swing! is actually a perfect expression of a decade whose pop culture has been all about recycling and revival.

The strength of Swing! indeed, is that the music and dance it celebrates are enjoying a new vogue at the moment. Director and choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett can therefore tap in to some '90s energies.

Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie are still at the heart of the show, and it would be a very poor thing without them.

The fuel that drives the show is mined from old hits like "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," "Harlem Nocturne," "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree."

And Taylor-Corbett's choreography is essentially a vivid and athletic re-creation of the moves that put our grandparents in the mood.

But there is just enough novelty in the songs and the dancing to give it some feeling of freshness.

In fact, the smartest thing that the producers have done is to look beyond the established Broadway names for their excellent cast. They've brought in new performers for whom, clearly, this music is intensely alive.

Ann Hampton Callaway has both the supple voice and the songwriting talent to put her own stamp on familiar material like Ellington's "Bli-Blip" and Goodman's "Stompin' at the Savoy."

Everett Bradley, too, contributes new material while making the old stuff his own. He performs his own "Throw That Girl Around" as if it were an old classic, and an old classic like "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" as if he had just written it.

And, best of all, the band — the Gotham City Gates — is much more than a bunch of capable pros assembled for the occasion. They are the real thing, a hot, hard-edged combo that shakes out the cozy sense of déjà vu that surrounds these songs.

Doing the same for the choreography is not so easy. Taylor-Corbett's attempts to inject new influences into the lively but limited vocabulary of traditional swing have mixed results.

Sometimes, as in Carlos Sierra-Lopez and Maria Torres' excursion into Latin Swing, the new fusions are as infectious as the measles and as lively as a kindergarten.

Sometimes, as in various attempts at Country Swing, they're as annoying as the measles and as unruly as a kindergarten.

But at least there is a constant effort to engage with the material and bring it to life here and now.

It may not mean a thing. But it does swing us exuberantly back into one of the liveliest periods of the century that is now closing.


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