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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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Last Looks

1/4/2016

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Twas the night before Christmas for the last time yesterday evening at the Koch Theater as the New York City Ballet wrapped its annual Nutcracker production for the year. After 49 shows—beginning the day after Thanksgiving—dancers were thrilled to cut off yellow and blue pointe shoe ribbons, peel off fake mustaches, and wipe off big red circles of doll blush for the very last time. Enthusiasm ran high, as demonstrated in the photo above by Mary Liz Sell letting her hair down post-show in the dressing room! I captured some last-day backstage moments before I too packed out my theater case and attempted to outdo Mary Poppins by stuffing as much as I could into my locker. Many of the younger dancers in the company danced in every single show and I congratulate them all on a job well done!    
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Gwyneth Muller, as Frau Stahlbaum, finally makes peace with the mouse invasion which besieges her living room in the Act I Battle Scene.
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By the last day even stressful quick changes are super casual. Bailey Jones and hairdresser/wigmaker Suzy Alvarez find time to joke during Bailey’s fast metamorphosis from Party Scene Grandmother into Snowflake.  
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Nutcracker/Jedi Magic

12/22/2015

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I am frequently amused by the technological gulf between the modern world and my old-school profession.  Ballet dancing is about as low-tech as it gets. There are no CGI tweaks to improve our performances; the only aesthetic help we get is from false eyelashes, contour, and hours in the studio or at the gym. I have written in the past about how little the pointe shoe has changed over the course of ballet’s history.  Ballet studios are equally rudimentary: a wall of mirrors and a fixed horizontal barre are about all one needs to practice the art form. I was thinking about this because yesterday morning, while at the barre in Nancy Bielski’s class at Steps, I looked out the window at the buildings all around me and spotted one massive modern skyscraper in the distance. I think it lies some twenty blocks away along Central Park South, but its sleek angled glass was jarring next to the filigreed stone and brick pre-war edifices of the Upper West Side. Without that towering beacon of modernity in my view of the skyline, I could have been at Steps 35 years ago (when it opened) and nothing would be different in the studio except the dancers: same space, same progression of ballet combinations, same piano, same leotards and sweatpants.    

​I have given several backstage tours in the past few weeks as friends and family have come to see the NYCB’s annual spate of Nutcracker performances, and I have noticed that while the children are not that interested in how the show’s visual effects are produced, the adults are incredibly curious about the stagecraft.  I wonder if children today are so inured to the special effects in film and video-games that they aren’t that impressed by the physics-defying coups of the production, like the Sugarplum Fairy’s toe slide. "We live in the grip of a technological paradox, in which the proliferation of wonders dilutes the possibility of wonder," NY Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote recently. Or maybe they are just at the age when magic is real and expected—it is the time of year in which Santa circumnavigates the globe in one night with flying deer after all.
 
Balanchine’s Nutcracker is theatrically impressive, but the magic is decidedly old-school. Many of the innovations are borrowed from the Mariinksy production Balanchine danced in as a young boy (the ballet premiered in 1892). When people come backstage the first thing they want to know is how the bed moves by itself in Act I. Many imagine that it involves a motorized system that adjusts 

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Hanukkah Gift?

12/12/2015

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Clockwise from the left: Ask La Cour, Marika Anderson, Tess Reichlen, Rebecca Krohn, Gwyneth Muller, Andrew Scordato, Me, and Savannah Lowery, photo by Silas Farley
Christmas came early this year! Thank you to Peter Martins for the best buddies casting last night. Because if you have to work the Act II late shift, it's best to do it with old friends! 
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Adventures in Pop Culture

11/7/2015

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Katy Perry with Olivia Boisson, Jenelle Manzi, me, and Gretchen Smith
I participated in a very unusual gig this week—dancing back-up for Katy Perry at the David Lynch Foundation benefit for Transcendental Meditation at Carnegie Hall.  The experience was as trippy as it sounds. But I could certainly get behind the cause: I do a lot of yoga and I do believe in the power of meditation. Although I don’t know how to “TM” (it was used as a verb by all of the performers) I would be interested to learn. Also, I love Twin Peaks!

When Maria Kowroski and Martin Harvey—the dance world’s most beautiful couple and imminent parents-to-be—asked me to participate in the number they were choreographing for Katy I did not know what to expect, but I said yes in a heartbeat.  I was thrilled to be a part of their first choreographic endeavor.  And I am of course a big fan of Katy Perry’s music (who isn’t?) and also of her tongue-in-cheek humor: see the “California Gurls” video, etc.

My boyfriend and I throw an annual Super Bowl party, and I must have replayed Katy Perry’s performance five times in a row last year, much to the dismay of the die-hard football fans in attendance.  I was secretly hoping to be cast as the infamous Left Shark for the Carnegie Hall 

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