sarma

There is a new breed of musicals on Broadway these days-musicals that are built on a dance impetus instead of conventional plots. In shows such as A Chorus Line, Grease, Chicago, Pippin, The Wiz and Candide, choreography is the lubricant that oils the wheels and maintains the momentum of the productions, some of them like roller coasters designed to thrill you within an inch of your life and deposit you intact with a smile frozen on your face.

The musicals of 10 years ago (pre-Hair, anyway) were musical plays-stories in which some clever people had poked holes and planted songs and dances. During the post-Oklahoma! years, choreographers and directors battled this format in an effort to integrate the musical numbers into the show. Games, fights, parties, dreams were all good pretexts for dancing. Sometimes the dancers pretended to be objects: two facing each other with lifted arms could be a doorway; three kneeling side by side could become a sofa. Paving the way for long, juicy musical numbers without sacrificing the forward momentum of the plot became a crucial problem for directors. Remember those moments when a character would arrive home and the audience waited to see what would catch his eye and trigger a song or a dance?

The directors and choreographers of the new musicals have returned to a pre-Oklahoma! practice: they often make no attempt to pretend that a "number" is anything but what it is. By working with the same techniques of fragmentation and incongruous juxtaposition employed by the experimental theater and dance people, today's musical-makers don't even need the elaborate pretext of the Backstage Musical. They have created a new convention which contemporary audiences accept. Pianos rise out of the floor; microphones are handed around; actors step out of their roles to introduce each other or chat with the audience.

Roles - though a necessary convention - needn't be taken too seriously anyway. For instance, in The Wiz (directed by choreographer Geoffrey Holder and choreographed by George Faison), one sees the familiar Oz characters-Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion principally as charming and expert song-and-dance men come together to team up with Dorothy (Stephanie Mills), a hot new vocalist. The nimble young Scarecrow (Hinton Battle) does his rag doll splits; the Woodman (Tiger Haynes) does stiff, spry tapsteps; the Lion (Ted Ross's role is currently being played by James mincing and strutting, is a smart-mouthed, stand-up comedian. And the Yellow Brick Road turns out to be those four spiffy guys in canary-colored suits and red wigs, noodling around in the background with canes. The Wiz isn't just a hip update of a sentimental fantasy; it's a fast-moving anthology of black theatrical styles from Bojangles to Aretha Franklin and Bill Cosby. The big cyclone routine features the dancers neither as distraught Kansans nor as personifications of wind, but as a crowd, nattily dressed in black, dancing in Faison's sharp, fast variant of Alvin Ailey's stylewrapping what remains of Dorothy's house in black streamers while Miss Eye of the Storm (tall Evelyn Thomas) bestrides the roof and lashes her elegant torso around.

Like The Wiz, the Bob Fosse musicals, Chicago and Pippin, operate on two levels. It's hard to believe in the bedrooms, jail cells and courtrooms of Chicago, everything is an act in a twenties nightclub, with chief murderesses Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly (Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera) as the toughest of hoofers. Pippin, despite its flimsy historical pretext, is a carnival show with the devil as barker and star magician.

In the Fosse shows, it is the chorus dancers-along with magic-show lighting and highly active sets-who seam the whole thing together. As well as functioning in the "numbers," they provide prowling or prancing transitions from one to the next. These dancers, almost constantly active, wear clownish combinations of tatters and finery (top hats, frock coats, garters, armor) that outline or bare lengths of thigh, morsels of breast and buttock. They look gleeful and sinister, oozing along, suddenly freezing into out-of-kilter poses. Their pelvises are hyperactive; their feet jab into the floor. The men tend to hunch their shoulders and make elaborate, flippant hand gestures; the women, stridently voluptuous, snake their arms. Everyone moves as if perpetually horny, yet meticulously obedient to some unseen puppeteer. Fosse has ranged himself with such prophets of decline and fall as Petronius and Bertolt Brecht - although where their tone is rancidly ebullient, his is precise and icy-and the dancing in Pippin, and Chicago, is as glossily cynical, violent, and depraved as everything else about them.

Here's a paradox. When choreography provides the basic texture of a musical and helps generate the high-intensity, driving energy that everyone seems to agree are Broadway sine qua nons, it must not call attention to itself as Dance, or the pace will stall. It certainly can't be inappropriate or idealized (no farm girls with superb techniques on pointe), and sometimes, for the sake of appropriateness, it must be tacky, inexpert, self-mocking, or even invisible.

This last is true of the choreography Patricia Birch provided for Grease (directed by Tom Moore) and Candide (directed by Harold Prince). In both shows, Candide particularly, there is an immense amount of motion, but nothing that the eye is supposed to light on as "choreography"-no people who stand out as trained dancers. The kids in Grease are raucously virtuosic singers: the fifties high school they're supposed to be attending is littered with microphones-since any emotional crisis of adolescence can best be expressed by an Elvis Presley. But rock-singing of the fifties was a highly developed style with its own elaborate conventions, while rock-dancing was defiantly do-your-own-thing. Consequently, aside from wild and clumsy carryings-on in the prom scene, the "dancing" in Grease consists of the jaunty struts, the restless jerks from immobility into action, the shrugging shoulders, and the twitching pelvises that signal turned-on teen-age libidos.

If Birch's contribution to Grease was to imbue the actors with suitable personal, and historical, movement styles, for Candide she must have functioned as an adroit and adventurous traffic cop. As if the failure of Candide in the fifties had convinced everyone that having a distinguished score and a distinguished book was no way to succeed in showbiz, Prince and Birch have made the action move so fast that you can hardly take it in. They've staged Candide's travels rather like a frantic board game along the perilous ramps that festoon the Broadway Theater: a throw of dice by invisible and capricious hands may send an actor scooting five scenes ahead or immobilize him, while two scenes back someone dear to him is being raped. There may not be any fancy steps, but Charles Kimbrough, galloping brilliantly in and out of three major roles, performs what amounts to a marathon solo dance.

There's a lot of genuine dancing in A Chorus Line. It's all about dancing-a "real" backstage musical. Yet even here the choreography doesn't draw attention to itself as Choreography. In fact, one of the greatest triumphs of choreographer Michael Bennett (who also directed the show and thought it up) is that he has refrained from making the dance element too distinguished. The audition material doled out by the show-within-a-show's director, Zach (Robert LuPone), is the usual unremarkable stuff: a little ballet, a little tap, a little jazz. The big number for Cassie (Donna McKechnie)-the soloist trying out for a chorus job in order simply to keep dancing-is a skillfully built pastiche of everything that a splendid and glamorous dancer like Cassie/McKechnie may have been asked to do in a musical comedy. Here are the whizzing pirouettes in a hugged-in ice-skater position, the big strides, the flung back head, the pauses for come-hitherish undulations of hips and arms. A Chorus Line isn't a hymn to the beauty of dance, but to the hard work, bravery, and persistence of dancers. The people in the show are the kind who know they can do anything if they just push a little harder.

Yet, although perhaps any skillful craftsman could have choreographed A Chorus Line, only a fine choreographic sensibility could have structured it as Bennett did. The dancers line up along the front of the stage for Zach and for us. Their reminiscences can make that line soften, send out tangents, disappear; but they always return to it. This superb device whispers clearly and insistently the same irony that the finale shouts: why do the dancers have to submit to this unusually painful audition, baring their individual souls, when this director needs them only to be components of a flashy anonymous border?

The dance format of these new and expertly crafted musicals has enabled them to avoid the old pitfalls. One can certainly lament a dearth of dancing that is beautiful and rich in its own right, but the reason for this is obvious: dance is being used to boost the illusions of speed, danger, aggressive energy we seem to crave. If these musicals, being popular entertainment, are accurate barometers of public taste, the implication is that not only do we not want to think, we want to be perpetually stunned. When a critic can enthusiastically compare the dancers in Pippin to tracer bullets, when even A Chorus Line has to fight for its integrity against metallic overmiking and performances screwed up to a desperate pitch of intensity, I begin to worry that this business of momentum and propulsive force can easily get out of hand-like a sleek car that tempts its owner to recklessness and provides neither a means to a destination nor a vivid view of the landscape, but only noise and speed and shiny surfaces.

I have, with considerable glee, restored my original title and the word "horny,---which the Times editors objected to. I remember screaming into a pay phone that 'Perpetually sexually aroused" (their alternative) was an abomination - in terms of euphemy as well as rhythm.