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Cats on Broadway

9/1/2016

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PictureGina Pazcoguin, photo by Matt Murphy
Cat person that I am, I had never seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats until this week. I have long been familiar with T.S. Eliot’s poems on which the show is based, and I knew some of the songs (“Memory,” bien sûr), but other than that I was a total newbie. My friend and NYCB colleague Georgina Pazcoguin stars as Victoria the white cat in the current Broadway revival, and it was wonderful to see her shine—glow, actually—in a new milieu.

Cats and ballet make for good bedfellows, even outside of the pas de chat or “step of the cat.” George Balanchine is famous for his obsession with his cat Mourka’s leaps. And NYCB ballet mistress Rosemary Dunleavy is always reminding us to place our feet nimbly like cats, to work exaggeratedly through demi-pointe when we roll through our feet. She also encourages us to study our cats at home when she coaches the crawling around in the Arabian solo in The Nutcracker—and  she often does this while wearing the iconic Cats on Broadway t-shirt for good measure! Perhaps this is why Gina looked as comfortable in the junkyard set as she does in her tutus.

I found the show to be quite a hoot, which is not shocking given its jocular source material, but that aspect surprised me nonetheless. It is basically a jukebox musical of cat puns—there is not much in the way of plot or character development. In fact, the few through-lines the show has are its weakest links: Grizabella’s mysterious outsider status and fall from grace are relatively unexplained, making her reincarnation at the end feel hollow. I also wasn’t convinced by Leona Lewis’s portrayal of an old kitty. I know she is the headlining star in the show, but she looked like she was play-acting. Wouldn’t a respected Broadway elder have been a better fit? And the evil Macavity’s arrival is hyped often, yet the event itself underwhelms. He doesn’t even get a song. His catfight sequence seemed really weak after the foreshadowing number by the silky duo Madison Mitchell and Christine Cornish Smith as Demeter and Bombalurina.   

What was such great fun about the show was the sheer silliness of it, from the cats entering through the dark audience with glowing eyes in the opening, to the grooming orgies, and the oddly poised group recitations of Eliot’s goofy verse. And the show is jam-packed with impressive dancing. Almost all of the cast sings and dances the whole time—and they are clearly an extraordinarily talented ensemble. Gina, whose albino unitard makes her stand out in even the darkest scenes, was in constant motion for over two hours. She danced beautifully and her committed performance alone is (in my admittedly biased opinion) worth the price of a ticket!

Since I am unfamiliar with the original choreography, I cannot comment too much on Andy Blankenbeuhler’s updates, but there were definitely some hip-hop accents that resembled his work in Hamilton. He also loves a slow, partnered lean-out arabesque. The dancing was really great throughout, and I couldn’t believe how well the performers were able to sing and enunciate while lifting each other, turning, and cartwheeling. Ricky Ubeda, as Mistoffelees, has the tour-de-force dance number of the production and he sailed through it. It contained a gauntlet of tricks: à la seconde pirouettes, coupés tombés jetés en tournant, etc. It reminded me of a Youth America Grand Prix solo, but with singing and a Siegfried and Roy light-up coat!

Since I’m having frequent Braxton-Hicks contractions and back pain now, it was hard to sit comfortably, and the show felt overlong to me. But I think even if I wasn’t extremely pregnant a little editing would have gone a long way. Also, how can you revive a cat musical in 2016 without a single nod to the internet? There was no cat-breading or cat-sushi-ing, no cat-Nicholas Cages or Hello Kitties, etc., to be found. When one cat took a ride on a broom I wished it was on a Roomba. This Cats revival is a little too serious for its own good, it is begging for some sort of meta-nod to modern cat memes.

Also, I’ve always had cats in my life, and cats are never that earnest. While Eliot’s poetry aptly describes many kinds of cats, (for example: my parents’ fat cat Giles was personified to a tee by Christopher Gurr as Bustopher Jones) I needed a little more cynicism to see the show as a proper feline tribute. The Cats cats perfectly embodied Eliot’s cat poems, yet for me to be convinced I needed to believe that they’d rather be contemplating his Four Quartets.   

Last week I watched Stranger Things on Netflix, this week I saw Cats on Broadway with a group of friends I’ve known since I was a kid. The 80’s are having quite the renaissance. It is so surreal, on the cusp of motherhood, to be inundated with imagery from my own childhood! 

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Michelle and Elaine get catty in the lobby
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Elaine, me, and Gina backstage
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More Broadway: Hamilton

4/11/2016

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Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton

In a great stroke of luck, some very generous friends took me to see Broadway’s juggernaut Hamilton this past Saturday night. Hamilton fever has been raging for quite some time in NYC, and the show is completely sold out for the foreseeable future. The show’s website kindly explains that there is absolutely no way to purchase tickets, it can only suggest the daily lottery. After failing at the lottery on and off for months, I figured I was just going to miss the boat on this one. So, when I got the serendipitous offer to actually go I wondered if the show would be able to deliver on all its hype and exclusivity. In short, it’s terrific.

From the opening number—a tight, energetic ensemble piece which deftly covers lots of expository ground, introduces the cast, and summarily presents the main conflicts in Alexander Hamilton’s life—to Eliza Hamilton’s quiet, grief-stricken denouement, I knew I was watching the work of a master. That would be Lin-Manuel Miranda, who conceived of the musical, wrote the book and lyrics, composed the music, and also plays the title role. I never saw In the Heights, his earlier Broadway hit, but I have been intrigued every time I have run across other facets of his talent: his impassioned NY Times op-ed about Puerto Rican poverty, his heartfelt Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Rita Moreno, his impressive free-style rapping on the late night talk circuit, and his bouncy music for the latest Star Wars’ revamped cantina scene.

Miranda’s influences in Hamilton are myriad, yet the synthesis of his disparate ideas and genres is seamless. Hamilton recasts the founding fathers as swaggering minorities engaged in epic, policy-focused rap battles. But then the music also ranges to almost calypso at times, with smooth R&B accents for Aaron Burr and sappy Brit-pop for the whiny King George. But even with all these competing ideas and energies, the show reminded me most of a completely different work in a completely different genre: the

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An American in Paris

3/16/2016

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Robbie Fairchild and Leanne Cope, photo by Matthew Murphy
I finally made it to see An American in Paris on Broadway last week, right before my NYCB colleague Robbie Fairchild ended his Tony-nominated run in the lead role of Jerry Mulligan. I’m afraid I can’t claim much objectivity where this production is concerned—I’ve danced with Robbie often, I’m friendly with his co-star Leanne Cope, and I’ve known the show’s director/choreographer Christopher Wheeldon since I was 15 years old (I was also a beatnik in the original cast of his An American in Paris ballet in 2005)—but with that partiality established, I thought I’d share some of my impressions from the performance anyway.

Overall I had a wonderful time at the show, and I would recommend it to anyone.  It made me so happy to watch Robbie, who clearly was having a ball. I fully expected him to be good, from years of watching him excel in Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story Suite and George Balanchine’s Who Cares?, and he did not disappoint. He looked like he was born to be up there, and his all-American look was perfectly suited the part of the yankee in Paree. Robbie is taking a breather from Broadway at the moment, but I suspect he’ll find his way back to The Great White Way someday.

Leanne Cope danced the role of Lise Dassin, his love interest, and I was completely blown away by her too.  She has a luminous face with large, doll-like eyes and beautifully shaped legs and feet. Her British lilt was replaced with a convincing French accent, even in song, and her voice rang out crystal clear in “The Man I Love.” In the climactic ballet sequence towards the end of the show she was as confidently sexy as she was shyly sweet in her earlier scenes, an impressive display of range. She had the miserable task of switching back and forth between character heels and pointe shoes between nearly every scene, and I don’t know how she managed to do it so quickly and so often!

​Robbie and Leanne’s balletic dream pas de deux was the highlight of the performance. That an intimate ballet number was the capstone in a big production (competing with splashy ensemble tap numbers, etc.) is a testament to Chris’s skill in partnering choreography, as well to the 

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    Faye Arthurs
    - Faye Arthurs

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